Design System Office Hours

One theme that has been our mind working in large mega design teams, is how our product design teams handle outside, external POV, vs historical cannon. Davy and PJ discuss this, weaved in with how we like to evaluate potential solutions for our systems.

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With convos of relying on external services such as design system docs sites, Figma plugins, or analytics, we talk about our experience working in large teams with funding to build our own, vs utilizing third party services that can simply get you up and running immediately.

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Davy and PJ talk a little more in depth about support and the dangers of being a purely reactive design system team. How do you handle requests, and how to operate the program during times of duress.

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Listener question: DS team of one, and how to keep afloat and keep the program going. We touch on what you might want to focus on, and getting help as soon as you can so you can scale.

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We are back in your lives with a normal 1:1 with Davy and PJ about design system complexities, and how you might want to consider a system with less tokens, variants, and what it's like for Davy to manage 149 components on web alone.

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We have a friend of the program, Cintia Romero from Pinterest to talk about her work leading the accessibility design and education programs that has been now consumed by hundreds of designers.

You can view the Pinterest docs site at:https://gestalt.pinterest.systems/

Recorded with @disco_lu a few months ago, Davy and Luis go rapid-fire on various design system hiring, component-building philosophies, and training. See below for timestamps.

(1:25): How Davy got started in DS

(6:00): Package my narrative as DS designer

(7:00): How to posture yourself to obtain your ideal position

(8:34): How to utilize existing job postings internally mentioning DS to get into your ideal position

(11:43): Davy’s way to cope with current layoffs

(13:05): Shift to more community in DS in the last few years

(14:05): How do we open the door for greater collaboration vs governance

(15:34): Merging with another team, how do we navigate

(17:04): How do you deal with change and keep working moving along

(18:16): How do you operationalize the merging of teams, files, ceremonies

(20:44): Where does design ops and product management intersect

(21:55): How do we deprioritize the pixels and prioritize planning

(26:10): Refactoring to infinity when not tied to a specific timeline

(29:05): Clear business objective around brand updates

(29:45): Sometimes even with apps like gmail, it takes a while to roll out updates

(30:44): Uber components that can do anything, is this the right method for most

(32:44): Design and engineering parity

(35:54): Separating components to be distinct use cases so you can see what you’re getting.

(36:55): Thinking tactically like an engineer

(37:40): File Hygiene

(38:28): Training and education and how to use your system as intended

(40:15): Watching people is the best way to learn

(41:22): Regular open office hours for any role

(41:51): Telling people what you’re working on and what’s coming

(43:12): Writing posts to talk about your work

(44:40): Collecting resources and learning together

(45:38): Doing a demo and going first to show best practice. Lead the way.

(47:23): Working an understanding how a specific component use case, doing a live design session.

(48:23): Systemizing training vs having 1:1s.

(49:00): Whether you need a design system

Happy 40th episode birthday. We talk about moving fast vs designing and building with intentionality, and naturally the convo led morphed into a half episode about ways of partnering with product designers, and how we work on our systems at Meta and Pinterest.

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With DS being table stakes on lots of product design teams, and even job postings, we talk about whether you need one, or whether your efforts should be scaled elsewhere. What are you really getting yourself into when you start this journey..

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This was a special LIVE RECORDING at The Future of Design Systems conference hosted by @IntoDSConf. Friend of the program @rominadesigner takes over as host. We talk about what hard skills are important to have (building components), and the novel idea of interviewing specifically for systems thinking.