Building Design System for Managing Design Consistency and High-Functioning Team

With the increasing complexity of product development, we often struggle on design consistency and quality. Our priority is to deliver the MVP as soon as possible, learn from it and iterate faster. We don’t have enough time to think about design scalability that will increase our product quality and time to market in the future. Because of that, we will have several design inconsistency, process inefficiency and increasing design debt that will be hard to manage over the time. At some point, it will be hard to do faster design, change our style or even do total revamp on our visual language.
Building a design system is helpful for multiple and large design teams. It supports the various teams to get a head start, re-using what’s already available, instead of starting from scratch. A design system can also help as a guidance towards consistent design, especially helpful if you aim to design for consistent experiences across products or touch points. With a design system in place, the designers may allocate more time towards aligning with developers. As such, design system can be used not only to achieve consistent design but also to help teams work collaboratively achieving better product experiences.