Dan Mall argues design systems should start by solving real customer pain points, not building generic buttons and headers. Talk to users, find what actually hurts, then build components that fix it, like complex dropdowns or custom tables.
You talk to your customers, you find out what their pain points are, and you try to solve the big ones as immediately as you can. That's what your MVP is. So I think a lot of people think it's blasphemy. You have to have buttons and cards and headers and footers, right? And I'm like, no. I've worked on design systems where the top three components are this really complex drop down thing, this table grid thing that everybody uses, and some obscure component that no other design system has. That's a really good design system.
