Building buy-in for your design system
Constructing components & drafting documentation is easy. Cultivating buy-in & navigating organizational dynamics is hard.
One of the most challenging aspects of managing a design system regardless of maturity is not crafting pixel-perfect components. It’s not testing interaction patterns or refining microcopy. And it’s certainly not selecting design tokens. It’s perpetuating sustained adoption & buy-in over time.
Here are a few key lessons learned through scaling design systems over the past couple of years.
Treat your system like a consumer-facing product.
Make the system real by giving it a name and identity for people to rally around. Much like consumer-facing products, it’s much easier to share and socialize a brand than something generic like “our design system” or “the component library.”
Make sure you have a clear vision for the design system that’s easy for non-designers to understand — know what you’re trying to achieve. Have a response for, “What’s the point” and “Why do we need this?” Have a really succinct elevator pitch for the business value of your system.
Have an accountable product owner who keeps the system focused on achieving the original vision with a roadmap to support it. If you’re reading this, then that person might be you.
Establish clear milestones that align with the priorities of your organization and have a way to measure success over time.
If you’re in the early phases of establishing your system, start small. Focus on releasing one component at a time and measure the impact to efficiency, effectiveness and quality. Roll out incrementally to existing products and teams. Don’t try to boil the ocean.
Create connective tissue.
Seek out champions for the system across the organization, by partnering up with others who are trying to achieve similar goals and outcomes. Include cross-functional representation and users in the decision-making process (e.g. the designers, developers, writers, and product folks who use the system).
Continually keep others involved — make things together. Resist the urge to go off on a design island. The quickest way to lose momentum and advocacy is by going away, making stuff and handing it to people.
Lead with a carrot, not a stick.
Don’t mandate rules. People don’t like to be told what to do and inevitably will ignore them, especially if they weren’t involved in creating them. Create as much value as possible so that people want to use the system, instead of enforcing strict guidelines.
Encourage usage and adoption of the system by making peoples lives easier, not mandating rules.
Communicate early & often.
People don’t like surprises. Be transparent with your roadmap and backlog and make sure your key stakeholders and users are aware of upcoming changes and releases, well in advance. The quickest way to make people hate your system is by pushing breaking changes that create work to fix.
Show clear business value.
Regularly highlight success stories and share evidence of business value and ROI. Go on a roadshow with key executives and stakeholders across the organization. Make sure you know your audience and speak their language — avoid tech jargon and design-speak. The fastest way to get blank stares from a CEO and lose funding is by using all the fancy design hashtags you just read on Twitter, but not showing the impact.
Know how your system supports and enables existing products, platforms, systems and tools. Use diagrams to show how the system integrates and fits within the broader business landscape. Make sure it’s clear how the system fits within your organization’s ecosystem.
Know your numbers. Have hard data to show how much it costs to run your system and how much value is being generated because of it.
Some ways to show the qualitative impact on quality & efficiency:
- Regularly survey & interview teams to understand perceived impact on efficiency before & after (e.g. sentiment analysis).
- Regularly survey & interview end users to understand perceived impact on quality before & after (e.g. usability, consistency, readability, etc.)
Some ways to show the quantitative impact on quality & efficiency:
- Story points per sprint, sprint team velocity, time spent per user story, time spent in design/development/QA
- Accessibility scores and projected revenue saved by avoiding accessibility-related lawsuits
- Page speed scores and performance gains
- Interaction metrics for user flows that include system components (e.g. response rate, click-through rate, visit conversion, etc.)
*Note — It’s very important that you make it clear to business executives that the system is a living product, which means it’s not comprehensive or finished. It’s also important that they understand that the system is not a drag-and-drop builder and should not replace strategic design, research or testing.
Top down, bottom up
Typically middle management will push back on adopting or using a system because it may compete with other key priorities for their team. Get buy-in from the top of your organization and show what’s possible to the boots-on-the-ground to help “squeeze” the middle.
Treat your system like a product and show clear business value. Make sure to spend as much time or more socializing, educating and evangelizing as you are designing, building and documenting. Focus on people over process — encouraging buy-in by driving value, instead of enforcing rules. Lead with a carrot, not a stick.
What do you think — anything to add to this list?
Drew Burdick is a multi-faceted design leader currently working as a Principal at Slalom in Charlotte — specializing in experience design, strategy & DesignOps.
