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One formula to rule them all: the ROI of a Design System

Co-authored with Guido Baena Wehrmann (Guidobw)

Maximilian Speicher
UX Collective
Published in
13 min readOct 4, 2022

TL;DR: Design systems are a crucial success factor for digital businesses, and virtually every major player works with one. Still, they can sometimes be hard to sell to management. Here’s a ready-to-use formula to calculate the ROI of any design system.

Design systems have become a standard in the digital industry. Virtually every big player uses one — from Amazon over Google and Airbnb to Uber. There have been numerous studies and reports on their efficacy in improving productivity, reducing bugs, and improving digital products (e.g., Boehm & Basili, 2001; Klüver, 2019; Loomer, 2016; Ray, 2018; Slack, 2019; Sparkbox, n.d.). And yet — as we have experienced in various jobs firsthand — it’s still a common situation that the value of having a design system has to be proven again and again.

For many features implemented in digital products, a simple competitive benchmark is enough to convince management, particularly in e-commerce. “If everyone else is doing it, we can just copy with pride,” is an often-heard statement. But the same standard seems not to apply to design systems.

This is most probably due to the fact that, at least at first, design systems are perceived as a very abstract investment — the value they’ll ultimately produce is not immediately visible and noticeable. On top, the upfront investment can seem huge to management compared to smaller, more…

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Written by Maximilian Speicher

A designer who writes about leadership, strategy, & anything UX • Doctor of Computer Science • formerly University of Michigan • maxspeicher.com/newsletter

Responses (4)

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Another factor that should be included in this overall ROI formula is QA (quality assurance). Most tech companies have dedicated QA roles who have to check the functionality of components/features for every PR. With a design system, there are also…

Do you have a graphic with the formula that has labels for each of the numbers? It’s extremely hard to follow along and the numbers 240 and 120 are still a mystery to me. What do they represent?

Also, the true value of a design system is efficiency…

Thanks for this! Really useful. Can the same calculation be used for centralised teams? To my experience it is hard to establish a federate governance model from the get go. In the DSs I worked on we started with a centralised time with the ambition to go federate once we reach a certain maturity level