One of the first things I wanted to promote once I joined the Product team in Beetrack was the implementation of a true design system. Until then, there had only been one UI/UX Designer that oversaw the three current Beetrack products. He had specified some components and foundation elements, but the work was far from a true Design System.
As the product team grew and more designers joined, it was obvious we needed to structure components, patterns, styles, and guidelines, to help operationalize and optimize the design efforts. Until then, more than a system we had a component and style library.
To our benefit, the front-end developers had begun to lay the groundwork for a Design System and even had a name for it: “Honeypot”.
They had components to test and show in Storybook, which helped us a lot with design QA and understanding what was already in use. It lacked the connection with the design team and the documentation from a UX perspective, but once we started to work coordinately we quickly sorted out those issues and began to see the benefits.
I offered to be the intermediary between front-end developers and the design team. I regularly met with the lead front-end developer to plan our sprints, which were paralel from the usual product sprints. We defined what should be taken next and how the work could be distributed with the amount of time and resources we had available.
I also organized regular meetings with all the UX/UI Designers to coordinate our work and make design decisions. We also used these instances to share knowledge and good practices that we later started to share with designers from other teams.
After months of coordinated work we could see all the benefits of having and maintaining a Design System. Now we had a unified language within and between cross functional teams. We began to have more visual consistency across products and channels. Design (and development) work was accelerated and, most importantly, we alleviated strains on the design team so they could focus on larger, more complex problems.