Thread by @_dte

Here are some things I’ve learned working on design systems at big companies (Facebook, >25k employees, many hundreds of designers, thousands of engineers) and small/medium-size companies (Dropbox circa 2015, <2k employees, ~20 designers, hundreds of engineers).

Some things that are easier at smaller companies:

• Adoption. You can get the whole design team—heck, the whole company—into a room to tell them they need to use the design system. POCs for products are easier to track down, and products are typically easier to adjust to the DS

• Change. A smaller product surface area and fewer points of contact means that rolling out system-wide changes has fewer unforeseen consequences.
• Feedback cycles are much, much faster. You’ll know within a week if there’s a team not using the system properly and why.

At big companies:

• Adoption is hard to move for a multitude of reasons: unsupported tech stacks, unstaffed projects, teams who want to develop their own visual styles, highly product-specific needs the DS won't support. Communicating the long-term value of a DS is crucial.

• Change at system scale is hard because the surface area is so much greater: hard to anticipate what overrides or context will cause a system change to fail or break something. Rigorous testing for DS components makes this easier (and is another reason for teams to adopt)

• Feedback cycles can be months-long: you may not find out about a team or product diverging from the system until it’s reached a level of visibility that makes it hard to course-correct. Making many clear feedback channels available is crucial to mitigating this.

It’s not all bad at big companies! Things that are easier at big companies:

• Staffing a full-time or federated team is much easier because there are, well, more people. DS often start as a passion project, and if there are more people around it, it more quickly gains traction

• Bigger companies typically have more sophisticated internal tooling and integrations that the design system can benefit hugely from. Distribution of the system to designers and engineers can actually be more challenging at smaller companies.

• System scaling feedback: with more people using the design system, the volume of feedback—both from an end-user perspective and a system-user (employee) perspective—is greatly increased. Feedback cycles can be much longer, but there are more of them.

Design systems aren’t better or worse at bigger or smaller companies, but they are very different. I love being able to look to companies of all sizes and learn about what’s working for their systems and how we might apply those learnings at Facebook.