Design systems at scale: unifying teams, products, and processes

As companies grow, managing product design across multiple teams and regions becomes increasingly complex. Our experience is that while small teams can often rely on a lightweight, agile approach, large companies face the challenge of maintaining design consistency across diverse product lines without slowing innovation.

Design systems offer a practical solution. They provide the structure and scalability needed to unify teams, streamline workflows, and ensure cohesive design language across all products and touchpoints.

With a design system in place:

  • Teams can move faster, avoiding the need to reinvent design elements or re-code components.
  • Development cycles are shorter, ensuring consistency as new features or products are introduced.
  • Collaboration improves, as product, design, and development teams work within a shared framework.

However, the success of a design system depends on its ability to evolve alongside the business. A dedicated design system team plays a critical role in governing this evolution, maintaining consistency, fostering collaboration, and ensuring scalability as the company grows.

When properly managed, a design system becomes a powerful asset that supports both scalability and speed, driving product success across the business.

The role of design systems in large teams

Product teams can often become siloed, each focusing on their own areas, often resulting in fragmented user experiences and inefficiencies across design and development.

A design system solves this by providing a unified framework that ensures consistency across all products. Ensuring that all teams work from the same design principles. This maintains both visual cohesion and functional consistency across products. Also simplifying communication by creating a shared language between designers and developers, making collaboration smoother and more efficient.

By standardising UI components, design patterns, and interaction models:

  • Developers can work more efficiently, using predefined elements, freeing up time for complex tasks.
  • Designers avoid duplicating efforts and can focus on innovation, rather than re-creating common elements.

For product managers, design systems provide clarity:

  • They can better predict the scope of design and development efforts.
  • The framework reduces delays caused by misalignment or bottlenecks.

The result? A more efficient product development cycle, where teams focus on solving problems and innovating, rather than reinventing the wheel.

Laying the foundation

Before implementing a design system, I suggest starting with an audit of existing designs and UI code. This audit done by the design team provides a clear view of the current state of design across the organisation, revealing inconsistencies and duplications that can be addressed by a centralised system. A common catalyst for organisations embarking on a design system journey is often a rebrand. The need to align a fresh visual identity across multiple teams and products makes it the perfect moment to establish a unified framework, ensuring consistency and scalability from the outset.

Key steps in the audit process:

  1. Catalog UI components and patterns: Document all existing elements, from buttons and forms to navigation and colour schemes. This helps teams identify redundancies where similar components have been built multiple times by different teams.
  2. Identify inefficiencies: By spotting and consolidating duplicative elements, teams can create a unified library that reduces duplication and speeds up the design and development process.
  3. Collaborate with existing teams: Engaging with teams that previously owned certain design aspects is critical. Their insights can provide valuable context for existing components, and their involvement ensures they feel included in shaping the unified design system. Without their input, teams may feel excluded, which can make it challenging to gain buy-in for the new, standardised approach.

When setting those core elements, I’ve found that planning out a system-agnostic foundation is the best approach. It allows teams to start adopting the design system without needing a complete overhaul or waiting for the final version to be ready. This method enables teams to gradually integrate the system into their workflow, making the adoption process quicker and smoother. For example, introducing foundational elements like grid structures, typography, or colour palettes early helps teams get started while more complex components are still being refined.

Image of a design system that includes foundational elements like grid structures, typography, and colour palettes.

In parallel, a code audit is essential for understanding how design elements are implemented in the front-end. Discrepancies between design and development often arise when there’s no consistent translation of design into code. A thorough audit helps streamline the codebase, align development with the design system, and create a more reusable architecture.

Once the audit is complete, it becomes easier to define the core principles and components that will form the backbone of the design system. Teams can then determine which elements to standardise, where custom solutions may still be necessary, and how to prioritise the system’s implementation across products.

With this solid foundation, companies can create a design system that not only unifies their visual language but also aligns design and development for smoother collaboration and faster product cycles.

Scalability and governance

As the number of teams grows, the complexity of maintaining a scalable design system increases. Without proper governance, even a well-built system can become fragmented as different teams make ad-hoc modifications to meet their own needs. This often results in inconsistencies in user experience and inefficiencies across the development process.

To avoid these issues, a dedicated design system team is essential. This team plays a crucial role in ensuring the system remains scalable, adaptable, and relevant.

Their responsibilities include:

  • Maintaining consistency across all products: The design system team ensures that all components and patterns align with the broader visual and functional language of the organisation. This includes creating a positive user experience for the product teams using the system. A well-designed system should be intuitive and easy to navigate, allowing teams to quickly find and apply the elements they need.
  • Managing updates to the system: As new products, platforms, or features are introduced, the team ensures that the system evolves to meet these needs without losing its core integrity. This involves version control and clear documentation, so all teams know how and when to adopt updates.
  • Engaging early to resolve potential conflicts: Rather than resolving conflicts after they arise, the design system team proactively participates in early design ideation. By suggesting established patterns from the system during initial discussions, they guide teams toward solutions that align with the system, avoiding unnecessary deviation and ensuring smoother workflows.

Without this centralised governance, teams risk duplicating efforts or, worse, creating components that don’t align with the broader design ecosystem.

In my experience, a dedicated design system team, removed from day-to-day product demands, makes a huge difference. It allows them to focus on building a system that works for everyone, free from the distractions of feature-specific tasks. They are able to take a more holistic view of the business, ensuring that the system is adaptable across multiple teams and products. Plus, this team can advocate much more effectively for the system’s adoption and evolution, since their focus is on the big picture.

In addition to maintaining visual consistency, the design system team is tasked with managing the system’s scalability. This involves ensuring the system can evolve to accommodate new developments while maintaining its core integrity. For example, version control helps ensure that older products can continue to use legacy components, while newer projects take advantage of updated versions.

Another key responsibility is fostering cross-department collaboration. Acting as a bridge between design, development, and product teams, the design system team ensures consistent and correct usage of the system. They also provide guidance, education, and resources, helping teams make the most of the design system while enforcing governance to prevent silos.

Finally, this team plays a critical role in championing the value of the design system across the organisation. By aligning the system’s evolution with the business’s growth and long-term goals, they position it as a strategic asset that drives both efficiency and innovation at scale.

Image of a design system for digital products.

Blurring the lines between teams

When design, development, and product teams work in isolation, silos form, creating misalignment and friction when integrating efforts. A well-implemented design system breaks down these barriers, enabling smoother collaboration.

Workshops and regular feedback loops play a key role in making this collaboration happen. By bringing teams together through workshops, you foster shared ownership of the design system. Everyone gets aligned early, reducing miscommunication later in the process.

Key benefits:

  • Workshops: Collaborative sessions between designers, developers, and product teams help refine and expand the system in real time. These discussions ensure the system evolves in response to real-world needs.
  • Streamlined feedback: Continuous feedback cycles are crucial. Product teams can share insights from user feedback, developers can suggest new components, and designers can adjust the system to reflect evolving trends.

The design system becomes a shared foundation, ensuring consistency across teams:

  • Designers work from a library of reusable components, enabling them to focus on solving bigger challenges.
  • Developers use predefined elements that match design expectations, reducing the back-and-forth.
  • Product managers gain predictability, with all teams working from the same framework, speeding up the development process.

Workshops and feedback loops foster collaboration, ensuring that the design system remains relevant as the business and its products grow.

For long-term success, a design system must be treated as a living, evolving asset, not a one-time implementation. As enterprises expand, the system must scale and adapt alongside changing products and technologies. A commitment to continuous evolution, supported by the right processes, governance, and team collaboration, ensures the system scales with the business, driving both innovation and long-term success

Want to know more about how DiUS can help you?

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