± Scale, better products, why it fails, silos, buy-in

In this episode, GitHub’s Design Systems Manager Diana Mounter talks about navigating the path from style guide contributor to full-time design systems manager. She covers everything from getting buy-in beyond the design team to deciding whether or not to make a system open source.

Listen to the podcast

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Getting executive buy-in for your design system

And don’t forget to estimate the impact of your design system.

Time saved per feature (performance)
Delivery increase (performance)
Bugs reduction (performance)
Usability metrics improvement (performance)
Team happiness increase (satisfaction)

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What’s missing from the collection of parts are clear guidelines: rules and principles of how everything fits together.

For most, a design systems we sell to the client is the right half. But without the left half, it’s useless.

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Building a Design System for 500,000+ users at Ryte

The real why Design Systems.

We build entire new tool concepts in a matter of days and are immediately able to test them and gather feedback with clickable prototypes. Only by that we will be able to reach our goal and create the best User Experience for website optimization tools on the market.

Our developers are really busy shipping new features and making our users happy. The last thing they want to do is waste time rebuilding things that were already developed by other Rytees.

Because our design system makes our UX team so much faster, they now spend less time maintaining out-of-sync Sketch files and more time conducting user research.

Their lessons learned:

The library is a living document

Merging the platform with marketing

Have the right people involved

Communication with development is vital

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