— Farai Madzima, Shopify / ClarityConf 2020 (YouTube link is not public)

Team setup types

— Nathan Curtis / Source (Medium)

Solitary

👍🏽 Pro:

• A production-grade codebase, based on an approved visual language, maintained and grown at another team’s expense.

👎🏽Contra:

• The needs of adopting teams are not considered.
• The other teams will build their own stuff.

Centralized

👍🏽 Pro:

• They serve many product teams, free from the bias of any product’s priorities.
• They setup practices and processes to validate emerging design.

👎🏽Contra:

• Context is missing: Lack of visibility into day-to-day, product-specific challenges.
• Lack of influence on product designers to balance tradeoffs between product and system objectives.
• Bottleneck

Federated

👍🏽 Pro:

• Limit perceptions of bias by representing many perspectives.
• Ease spreading the system across teams by equipping more evangelists.

👎🏽Contra:

• Practical challenges in decision making.
• Each designer’s retains autonomy for and an allegiance to their product team.
• A designer must be able to convincingly transcend tribal affiliation for the greater good of a cohesive user journey, in how balance both their time and decisions.

It is often the desire to set up a large design system team, and finally do things right. But this approach does not always scale. A centralized team quickly becomes a bottle neck and does not work with real world requirements. But without a central team it is difficult to keep a holistic overview.

Setup a mix of both: A small central team can work on the fundamentals with a holistic overview and include the different teams by offering different services:

• Host a federated Design Systems Council meeting: Meetings
• Enable contributions: Contribution
• Keep your system alive with a shared ownership, build a community and take an internal open source approach: Collaboration

Big teams can be a bottleneck

The first and centralized team grew (due its success) to a size of 30 people. It became a big bottleneck and other teams started working around it, so they could move forward. The approach was not scalable. So they restructured their design systems family and their team structure. Encore is not a single team, it’s several teams (blue circles). A dedicated program manager coordinates all of these teams.

— Shaun Bent, Spotify / Source (YouTube)

Read the architecture article for a detailed explanation about their design systems family.

Architecture

— Shaun Bent, Spotify / Source (YouTube)

They now have a team setup, that is a mix of a federated / centralized approach.

In this sense, both sides become teachers and students of the system, continually learning from each other and improving on the current state.

— Josh Mateo and Brendon Manwaring / Source (Blog)