A short talk advising practitioners on how to secure organizational buy-in for a design system. The speaker argues against pitching hypothetical ROI to leadership and instead recommends building a small, under‑the‑radar pilot on a single product to produce tangible schedule and cost savings, then presenting those concrete results to win broader investment.
Most people do is they go, they have the plan for a design system and then they go, oh, it would be great if we had this. Let's go get buy in for it. And so what they do is they put together their, you know, their talking points, their roi, their metrics, they're all that stuff. And they go and pitch it to leadership. And they go, if we had something like this, it would save us, you know, 10% of our costs on projects or 20%. And leadership goes, it would save us that cool. Like, we have other things that we could invest that money in anyway. And it's because you don't have anything tangible to show, right? You have the hope of a plan. It's like asking somebody like, do you want to lose weight? And they're like, yeah. And they're like, cool, you should go to the gym. And they're like, cool, I know I should. And then that's it. There's nothing actually tangible about it. So instead what we suggest is this is the pilot thing. It's like, use it on one product, do a design system without the funding, without the buy in, without the investment. Do it under the radar. Do it as a weekend project. Do it. And then what you can do is you can go to leadership and you can say, we already saved 10% of it. We finished this project six weeks ahead of schedule. Would you like us to finish other projects six weeks ahead of schedule?
