Design systems

Developing a low-touch adoption strategy for a new design system

Actions you can take to help drive and track the adoption of a design system within a large organization.

Photo by Surface on Unsplash

What team should be the first to adopt a design system in a large organization? How can we support new product teams to adopt our design system in a low-touch capacity? And how can we track adoption across the org?

These questions come up almost every time I work on a design system. Most recently, it felt more nebulous than before: I was working on a design system for a large enterprise. They had several products and countless product teams. So which product team would be best to trial our product first? And which product was ripe for transformation?

I first touched on this subject in my article, Who should adopt a design system first? But I wanted to share examples, exercises, and tools I’ve leveraged or developed in order to establish a sustainable, low-touch rollout strategy. I’ll cover how I determined “early adopters”, as well as key milestones we set.

Milestone 1: Know your options

Who are your users?

And who will need onboarding material?
Create a stakeholder map of all your potential users. Below I’ll share two frameworks I’ve used to do this:

For the best results, run this as a quick exercise with your entire team. Here is a stakeholder map template.

Mapping out the various people who will be impacted by the product will help you account for all user groups, and identify leadership groups you need onside.

What team’s could use your design system?

What products are being worked on? Who works on it, and how often do they deploy updates? What platform do they use?

List out all the potential product teams who will use your design system. The more granularly you understand the product teams, the easier it will be to identify candidates prime for beta testing.