A short talk arguing that a design system must be treated as a product requiring dedicated sustainment: designers, engineers, UX, budget, and a roadmap. The speaker compares design systems to SaaS products that need continuous maintenance to avoid disruptive changes for users and recommends a dedicated team whose job is to sustain the system.
A design system is a product. How do you sustain that product? Well, the product has to have designers on it, it has to have engineers on it, it has to have UX people, it has to have a budget, it has to have a roadmap. It has to like all of the things. If you think about a product that you use, whether it's digital or physical care goes, especially digital care, goes into constantly maintaining that, you know, software as a service, design systems are sometimes a software as a service. And so it has to be sustained that way. And it can't be like, oh, we'll get to it when we get to it. Imagine if the software that you used every day was like, oh, we'll get to it when we get to it. People flip out when Gmail changes something. People flip out when their email software. A design system is the same thing. So it's got to be sustained by a particular team whose job it is to sustain that actual product that everyone is using.
