Dan Mall (speaker) advises against pitching "vaporware" when requesting investment or sponsorship for design systems. Instead of citing other companies' successes, he recommends demonstrating traction—concrete signals like active users and growth projections—using a VC funding analogy to explain why sponsors (internal stakeholders like VPs or CFOs) are more likely to commit resources when there is evidence of adoption.
One of the mistakes that I see a lot of people do with design systems is they pitch vaporware to their sponsor, to their investor. You know, even though that investor is not investing money, they're investing resources or teams or, you know, people. So what a lot of people do is they go, okay, we're going to go into our VP of Design's office or our CFO or whoever it is, and we're going to pitch the value of a design system as. As this design system created value for these other organizations. Hey, this is what Target did, or this is what American Express did, or this is what this other company, you know, this Lyft, did with their design system. But they have no traction because they haven't even done anything. So they're basically asking for investment in nothing. It would be like going to a VC and saying, like, I have an idea. Will you give me money? And, you know, there are some people in our society where that works, and most of us, it does not work. You know, Instead, what do VCs respond well to? They respond well to, you've already built a product and you go, hey, we've got 100, 100 active users this month. We think we can get it to 250 next month. And then here's our projection for that's much easier to invest in because there's already a signal of traction.
