As many others I have read @kaelig's post Introducing Design Systems Ops with great joy. My head was in danger of falling off from all the nodding and seeing my past years' work reflected in it <3
But there is this one thing that doesn't sit right with me:
who will bridge the gap between the design systems team and the engineering team?
It implies that there is a "design systems team". That might be a thing for very large companies – to quote Jina's presentation on Living Design Systems:
16K+ employees, lots of products, hundreds of developers.
For many of us, that is not the case. Most companies I know are at least one magnitude smaller: hundreds of employees, dozens of developers, and some products. Not to mention the 3 person startup.
All of us working in these smaller companies want their respective products to have a great UI, too.
I enjoy staying as cross-functional and flexible as our current constraints allow. That is true for me as an individual as much as for the team I work in.
Although I understand how this needs to be split up in larger companies, I haven't met a single person yet who is excited about all the process overhead and politics it introduces.
If we want this whole idea to be a thing (and I really really do), it should scale down, as well as it needs to scale up.
A great Design System is one part of the (hopefully) great toolchain with which we operate the usage, creation and maintenance of our great UIs. We have other problems and missing tools, too. Some questions for you:
- Do you even have a living patternlab yet? Is it used across the whole product yet? Is everybody comfortable using it?
- Is your dev environment supporting the use and enhancement of the pattern lab? Is all of that well documented and has a clear entry point?
- Do you notice when your UI breaks – both visually and functionally? Is everybody empowered to fix it?
- Do you lint your design code? Is it easy and clear to write code that lints without errors?
- Does your CSS scale and perform well?
- Do you have a build system for your icons, or does somebody need to click around in IcoMoon's weird interface, knowing exactly what to export where to, without breaking character codes?
- Do you have a sandbox for prototyping UI concepts and getting feedback quickly?
- Can you export templates for Sketch, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Keynote from your pattern lab, so they don't need to be maintained manually?
I could go on, but you get the idea.
So let's enhance Design Operations as a whole, not just the design system.
🤘 Design Ops 🤘
Nice one!