The irregular design manager newsletter #22
Twitter is shutting Revue down so I migrated my newsletter to buttondown. Some of the older posts may be broken in formatting, but I don't plan to go and fix them anytime soon.
We've been working on a design system at Jiva and I got some time in the last month to go through the Figma Schema conf talks and a few stood out to me [Disclosure: I've not watched them all].
Influence is crucial for success
In 2023, the ROI of a design system is understood by most, and there even seems to be a formula to calculate it. Even then adoption of a design system is hard and takes way longer than it took to design it in Figma(or tool of your choice). Yes, brand refreshes and redesigns helps speed the process but for all other situations, you need influence.
"Influence relies on trust, communication and relationships" - Lauren LoPrete
Your design systems team needs to build that influence in the organization and cultivate endorsers who will vouch for the systems in roadmap meetings.
and ICYMI, these advocation videos by Alex Cornell created during his time at Facebook, can serve as inspiration for what you can do for adoption of your design system.
Missing links in the tool ecosystem
Until Figma starts supporting tokens export, adopting design tokens is not easy. The ecosystem seems to be propped up by Figma tokens and Style dictionary. Schema talks from Doordash and Asana point to this being the current popular method unless you've got the chops to build your own tools like Atlassian.
Design roadmaps for transparency and empathy
Though the talk by Jules Forrest is centred around the design systems roadmap, it provides a good structure for building roadmaps for any project and understand the priority of projects especially for research roadmaps.
That's it for this issue 👋🏽