Dan Mall (YouTube talk) advises teams to let design systems be emergent: first build a concrete product (example: a financial-advisor customer dashboard), then extract reusable parts to form the design system. He compares this approach to making a TV pilot—film one episode (build one product) to see what actually works before formalizing a system.
First, let it be emergent. So instead, make a product. If you're a financial advising company, the first thing you can make is maybe a dashboard for your customers to see their financial activity. Don't worry about the system part yet. And then after you're done making that thing, then you look at it and go, how do we extract all of the parts from that? We call that piloting a design system. You think of it like a TV pilot. When, when TV shows pitch a network, they pitch a pilot. They don't just say, oh, we are thinking about a show that has these characters and these are the situation. No, what they do is they film one episode and then you can see, oh, that's how it actually works. So same thing is true in creating a digital design system and also a non digital design system too.
