Episode 41 Raw Data

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1	Thanks for your interest in The Question! Sign up to participate in future questions here. This file is the raw data from Episode 41, deep dive hosted on January 10, 2025 with Ben Callahan and Taylor Cashdan. There are 72 answers. The question this week was: ----- This week’s question: Hello, curious people! First of all, happy new year 🥳🎉 As always, when January hits, I have a hard time believing another year has gone by. 2024 was a hard year for many of us, but building this community was genuinely one of the highlights of my year. For that, and for each of you, I’m so grateful. Alright. Now, onto what’s next! It’s Monday, and you know what that means. The Question is LIVE! This week, I’ll be joined by long-time listener/first time caller, Taylor Cashdan as co host. He and I were chatting before the holiday break about what to cover in this first episode of 2025 and we landed on a bit of a hot take—I mean, did you expect anything less from Taylor? He shared that he’s heard countless design system practitioners say something along the lines of, “People don’t read our docs.” If you’ve been participating in The Question for long, you’ve probably heard this come up in our deep dives as well. The problem is, if they’re not reading the docs, they either don’t know they exist (ie., we’re not really meeting them where they are), or they’re likely not using the assets in the way we intended. And if they’re not using the assets properly, then why are we even offering them at all? The uncomfortable truth about our jobs is that we have to do so much more than just building components—we have to build excitement. In addition to our design/development/product/UX/content/etc. craft, we have to be marketers. But there are precious few articles out there about how to apply the tried and true methods of marketing and content creation to our jobs working on design systems. This is the context for the week—we want to push beyond open doors and newsletters to explore how we can learn from what social media content creators and straight up marketing folks are doing. Let’s jump in!  How do people feel about using your design system? Who on your design system team is responsible for “marketing” the DS and what is their skill set? (For example, you might say, “Susan is responsible and she’s a frontend developer”) How many individuals in your organization is the design system meant to serve? What has created the most engagement or excitement about your design system?
2	Question 1: How do people feel about using your design system?	Question 2: Who on your design system team is responsible for “marketing” the DS and what is their skill set? (For example, you might say, “Susan is responsible and she’s a frontend developer”)	Question 3: How many individuals in your organization is the design system meant to serve?	Question 4: What has created the most engagement or excitement about your design system?
3	Meh	I, as as PM, and Maxime our PO are basically in charge of marketing our DS.	More than 5,000	The launch of the DS itself (I don't think we've achieved such excitement after that)
4	So excited!	Lead Design System Designer, and Frontend Architect.	50–200	Documentation, and fast pase of development.
5	we just finished building our v1 and starting adoption so im not 100% sure how people feel using it yet. we hear some positives in pockets but need to dig into the details	everyone on the team takes part in this to some extent. mostly this has been designers but we are trying to encourage devs to be marketers as well		showing how much better managing our front end will be has so far generated the most excitement but we are working on teaser videos and education to help this along more
6	So excited!	My manager, who is the product design director for our business vertical, my colleague, who is also a DS designer, and I. We have frontend developers who work full-time on design system, but they don't actively market the DS. We haven't assigned anyone as responsible for marketing the design system.	50–200	It's usually the release notes and announcements of new features or components that gets everyone excited about the design system. The new features could either be possibilities with a set of components that were not possible before, or just annoying bug fixes.
7	So excited!	unsure	200–1,000	while office hours, official ds meetings for design organization
8	Overall people welcome the use of the system but many teams have "excuses" not to use it because pressing timelines, outdated technology, design and tech debt that prevents them to use the system	This is a shared responsibility, every team member, system ambassadors, few folks in leadership are constantly promoting and advocaing the use of our design system but ultimately, this is my responsibility as the design system manager	200–1,000	Reusability, Design & Code library, Office Hours
9	So excited!	We've all played a part in this – formal marketing (release videos) have traditionally been created by our team, and then released by our product manager highlighting a new component capability.	50–200	A lot of our applications have grid views, so the grid component release videos generated some of our most excitement. This got other team's product managers excited. However, in the trenches support of developers and designers seems to be most effective – once a developer truly grasps how they can use the design system components, and we fix any bugs found, they get really excited. We've had several of these moments over the last few years.
10	All of the above!	No owner. A couple design team leads, a content lead, and the researcher take the lead on marketing but product starting to be more involved in a lead capacity.	1,000–5,000	New initiative to be more flexible. That things come out of the box and should be easier and compliant if you use the system
11	Meh	UX operations team	Not sure if by indiviuals you mean direct users (designers, etc), so 1-50 ... or by all the teams working on the platform (product, engineering) so 50-200 ..!	Some very high-quality communications via a newsletter with articles, videos, links to webinars etc
12	Meh	We are a small team who are all in some way responsible for marketing and providing comms on our DS. The main comms do typically fall on the managers in the team - inc. myself as a DS design manager and Lea our Engineering manager. I work across design, design management, product management, strategy, marketing and the comms side of the team.	50–200	Some recent user and strategic value adding product improvements from components and patterns in the system. This helps the business scale up to a larger user base (examples...bulk action pattern, reporting pattern, multi-select filtering etc). This excitement and engagement has come from recent leadership praise for our 2024 efforts and highlighted that our team are a very important strategic asset. We also did a 'wrap the year' at the end of year which helped raise the visibility of the level of work and improvements we've made as a team. This highlighted some good qualitative user feedback from both customers (using the new components/patterns) and feedback from internal users of the system (our docs, ref website, support enquiries, UI kit etc)
13	They don't want to use it	Doug is responsible and he's a brand and marketing expert	1–50	Having a brand for the design system
14	Meh	One of our responsabilities as a core team is to "socialize" our DS. We are two designers, two devs and two content strategists. Each one has a different take, for example, one designer focuses on components, while the other focuses on planning.	50–200	The hability of creating a website faster and more efficiently. The use of design tokens as a communication tool between designers and devs.
15	Meh	David and he's a generalist	1–50	That it has the brand refresh
16	I think people want to be excited about it but are hesitant because of their project constraints and unknowns in our upcoming updates what how much work that could possibly mean for them.	A group effort: Design director, design lead, engineering lead, dedicated DS Product Manager	50–200	Showing vs telling. Everyone is being asked to do something major with our brand. We are showing how we can make that easier for them with our upcoming design system updates. We are also asking them for their feedback and what's on their plate so we can take that into consideration. Sometimes, feeling heard is the most exciting thing for consumers.
17	So excited!	The DS creator and PO are responsible.	50–200	Releases of new components and content guidance.
18	They don't want to use it	Product Owner, Lead Designer and Lead Developer	50–200	Hybrid working sessions and feedback sessions.
19	They don't want to use it	Mainly our design director	200–1,000	Updating the brand style. The execs understand that.
20	So excited!	We hired a “platform coordinator” who has a strong background in branding, marketing, and running an agency.	More than 5,000	Monthly check-ins with clear, understandable explanations of the DS and its value… with some subtle yet thoughtful branding.
21	We work async and fully remote, so it can be tough to pick up on sentiment. My gut says that most are just satisfied to use something as "part of the job," while a few don't want to use it when it impedes with their job, and a few others may be excited if they realize something about it makes their job easier (like not having to rebuild part of the UI).	Everyone on the design system team is responsible regardless of role. We can each market in unique ways.	200–1,000	Dark mode and Tailwind.
22	Meh	As Product Manager I take on this role around communications with the wider org. I also rely on our DS designers and engineers to provide education and generate excitement for specific solutions with their peers.	50–200	New feature releases that teams have asked for, facilitating brand updates (type, color) through system assets so individual teams don’t need to, accessibility support built in/documented so individual teams don’t need to do it on their own.
23	Meh	Me. I am the entire design system team. My title is Senior Technical Product Designer.	50–200	I was hired in October 2024 and this is the first time that the company has had a dedicated resource for the DS.
24	Meh	Our design system lead is responsible. He has a fantastic deck to present. As a leader, I’ve had him present to my entire portfolio. I would say everyone is excited about the design system not necessarily about the amount of work to roll over to it.	More than 5,000	Design system lead!
25	So excited!	me and I'm a former marketer	50–200	2 things: 1. consistency 2. the marketing team learning that we can standardized components in AEM that they can test with
26	Meh	All of us really, to respective audiences. We have 2 FE devs and 2 designers dedicated to design systems. We also have a design ops partner that is a huge advocate. But truly we are lucky because we have strong advocacy from the director and vp level of product and design.	1–50	New requested components being added (which is a double-edged sword), unlocking theming and dark mode, and design systems being a service/advisor for good design and implementation help.
27	Meh	I am! Sole designer (and product owner) of the design system.	50–200	Engagement: When paired with upcoming work or features. Excitement: Any quality of life, design system upgrades in Figma
28	Mixed bag - some love it and some are meh, and then there are those who love Material UI	Everyone on the team (UX, A11y, Eng, Product Mgr, Leadership) plays a role in marketing the DS. Day to day encouragement is using it, why to use it and how best to use it. Mostly it falls to the PM and leadership (Eng Mgr, Principal Eng, UX Director) to bring awareness that the DS exists and the value of using it.	1,000–5,000	Building a strong community around our design system has helped. We have a dedicated team that builds and maintains the DS but we are also a strong inner source product at Target so we welcome any and all contributors. We also take an approach of “we are here to help” versus “you must use this.”
29	People seem to be on the spectrum - some love, some resent, some don't know it really exists...	We have a designers who design the component pages. We have a content designer who writes the content and supports the IA. We consult w/ our tech partners to inform and they compile tech docs there. We've only recently started a "comms" workstream to have someone accountable (mult responsible parties) for broad spectrum communications to our audience. and, we've created a "documentation" workstream - this is to populate and enhance our documentation site. Goal is for these 2 teams to work together, but acknowledging each has a significant amount of work on their hands.	More than 5,000	We offer periodic trainings on tough topics - people seem to enjoy those. These are live and the recordings go on our site. We're only now getting better about sending surveys after events/trainings or gathering metrics on visits to portions of the site. In short, we're a little late to the game and working our way through tracking engagement. We have fairly high engagement on the newsletters we sent out last year. Supposed to be quarterly, ended up 2 times.
30	So excited!	I am and I’m a UX/UI Designer with a background in graphic design and branding.	1–50	Live design system onboarding sessions with the team and wiki dedicated to the ds.
31	Meh	Me, and I'm the owner/manager/product lead of it.	1–50	Layouts and brand assets
32	So excited!	It's all of our responsibility on our team to market our design system.	50–200	Our components being timed with product team initiatives and projects where our component will enable them to reach their goals easily. For example, we were focusing on marketing initiatives last quarter and our BannerComposable was build specifically for those use cases. That meant the component was going to for sure be utilized and shipped into our actual product.
33	Meh	Our Sr. Advisor of Growth and Engagement. They are part of the Growth team of our business unit and dedicated to the Design System team.	More than 5,000	We offer recurring monthly demos in both French and English for the new enterprise design system. Promoting these sessions via our organizational mailing list and design system mailing list has led to many registrations for the product demo. We are about to test a monthly meetup with our users and interested parties. The product feature that created the most interest was multi-framework offering, Figma library (previously no Figma), and more components focused on transactional web applications vs. static web publishing (that previously didn't exist in the old system).
34	Meh	me, it's me	1–50	plain and simple: regular Slack update posts about what's new, with screenshots. not roundups, not newsletters, just changelog/update posts. key is that it is geared towards THEM. for example, instead of a dry changelog post, this Slack msg about an update to toasts got 17 reactjis and 6 comments (we have 5 designers and ~30 eng who regularly do frontend, so this is a pretty decent/high reply rate): shipping a big refactor to CDS Toasts. the API remains the same (useToast hook), but you can now: - pass a custom action - have all of the semantic colors (default toast is midnight blue, now you can have success, warning, and info, not just error) - accept a custom autohide duration - the old-ass deprecated toast is deleted!
35	In my last role, the feelings were mixed. Some loved it, some ended up connecting too late in their process and found it a gate keeping mechanism that slowed things down	In my opinion, all systems team members are leaders in their craft, and as such are marketing optimal usage of the system. However, updates and communication outward is the explicit responsibility of leadership, particularly Product Managers if the team has them.	200–1,000	Great customer service through Slack and Office Hours support, and anticipation of upcoming needs
36		Ops team	1,000–5,000	Ai stuff
37	Meh	John is the program manager so he oversees the communication plan. Megan oversees DS content design, so she is the one creating a lot of the comms. Nate, Bobby Jo, and Mohammed are design/UX engineering/software engineering managers and they are responsible for the content itself. Kristine is a designer who oversees our short videos initiative. And I'm usually the one who requests certain comms based on opportunities I identify.	200–1,000	Dedicated live presentations, presentations as part of town hall, dedicated DS lunch and learns.
38	I don't currently have a design system	I am not currently on a design system team		I don't currently have a design system
39	So excited!	Content/community engagement folks	200–1,000	Trainings, making education fun
40	We are still building it out - everyone is excited but not actually using it quite yet.	Mostly it’s designers who are engaged in promotion of the design system. Front end engineers support the effort but are not very vocal. Often times product managers mention design system as an excuse to do something later “we’ll fix it when the design system is out, right?”	1–50	As mentioned, we haven’t launched one yet - however - people are excited to reap the general benefits assumed a design system would fix - easier system-wide updates, faster development, reduced variability etc
41	So excited!	I, as Design System Manager, am primarily responsible for marketing the DS, though our lead designer does a fair amount of advocacy as well.	50–200	The availability of coded components that provide design consistency with built-in accessibility.
42	Most DSs have been received well when complimented with testing early	It's usually rotated	varied - usually in hundreds	Always when assets worked better than they used to
43	So excited!	We have bimonthly office hours/"what we are working on" that I'd say "markets" our design system the most. All communications are written by or at least edited by our content strategist/content designer	50–200	Capturing the new-ness/excitement surrounding the design system in all of our design artifacts we release, such as presentations, documentation branding and demos. For context, we just released a new design system to replace the previous one that was created in ~2018ish. The previous iteration was viewed as "old and technologically stagnant" so we are pushing hard to differentiate ourselves.
44	Meh	Myself as a product designer	1–50	myself and the VP of engineering.
45	They don't want to use it	One project manager.	50–200	I'm not sure.
46	Meh	Our team has our own content designer (UX Writer) who handles the marketing for our design system	1,000–5,000	Big, impactful launches, e.g., the design system was recently used to facilitate the rollout of a new custom font; in the past, we've rolled out complete redraws of our icon suite. Big, shiny things tend to create the most excitement. Maybe because it's something you easily point to and showcase.
47	I'm not currently on a design systems team, but I want to stay active in the community	On past teams either a designer or a creative engineer would be responsible for marketing the design system	1–50	Ease of use and the time it reduces to ship features
48	So excited!	Depends on the client. Usually it's my design partner who works in the more tactical aspects of Design Systems.		Honestly, solving a pain point. Make things that people already really want and it's a much, much easier sell.
49	Meh	Just wanna say there should be a step between meh and so excited, that's where i think I'd land, maybe "excited-ish but skeptical" lol. I am responsible for the marketing of our system. I am the design lead, in-house at an ecommerce org. My background in graphic design and branding helps with the story-telling, and previous experience as a professor helps with the presentation chops. I like it, i like the relationship building and team collaboration, but I'm not a naturally outgoing person so I still have to psych myself up a bit. Plus, it's so difficult to cultivate real enthusiasm in corporate environment these days where people are feeling a bit unstable. All that said it really is the unseen portion of work that is so important to engagement and adoption.	1–50	Listening to what people want and need and trying to find ways to meet them. Its a user experience exercise of understanding you user and then finding ways to help and wrapping it in a good story. Showing and proving —building trust through collaboration and support, showing up, being visible with a good attitude.
50	Meh	It’s a shared responsibility between our whole design system team. We are designers and developers.	1–50	We are doing our first release for the design system in the next few weeks. We have a sizzle reel and building education material.
51	Depends, it’s a mix of people that know companies work like this now and others who want to have freedom of expression like they did when they were working for other companies.	In theory our head of Brand, in practice the design system team is doing the marketing bottom up, project by project.	1,000–5,000	It’s difficult to talk about excitement I would say, most people engage with the DS because they have to or are told to do so. Most engagement comes from developers who love having a library with already made parts and components that they can use out of the box. I guess each role in the company ( designers, devs, PMs) engages in a different way and for different reasons.
52	Completely mixed from being excited and really grateful it exists, to meh, they don't think they need it (aside from the components themselves)	All (2÷) team members are based on who lead the initiative. Designer, design-engineer	50–200	Typically larger initiatives like when we revamped all of our tables with new design and additional features that impacted almost all surfaces/teams.
53	Meh	There is no DS	50–200	Unfortunately, we don´t have DS in our company!
54	Meh	When we had a dedicated team the lead designer and staff engineer were responsible depending on the deliverable	50–200	We had a rebrand that kind of forced engagement but the top down approach also created a lot of tension during the chaotic time that we now are working on repairing
55	So excited!	PM for PM, Designer for design and Eng for engineering. We agree on the “marketing tactic and message” and reach out to our respective groups.	50–200	More content inside our front end doc site, Storybook. Teams went so long with no guidance they are all excited for it now.
56	Meh	Advocacy team	1,000–5,000	Composable components
57	So excited!	We have Amy, our Design System Advocate.	50–200	Making the system Federated. Lots of improvements to the code.
58	Meh	designers only, they built the UI library and try to convince others to use it	1–50	easy switch between operation systems (variable modes)
59	Meh	I am responsible and I am a designer.	1,000–5,000	New releases for features they are working on.
60	Meh	All of us, everyone should have an input because we will all have different things to add - designers will see it differently than devs ect.. We are contracted to make design systems for multiple companies, unfortunately this makes it hard to market design systems ourselves as we are often too external.	50–200	Providing high quality examples - this proves the value rather than just explaining it. It also makes the barrier to entry feel lower. Prioritising requested components and docs and talking about this fact - this ensures the design system actually provides value.
61	Mixed bag of advocates and detractors	Christine is our PM.	200–1,000	The move to a fully accessible library and now moving to recipes and slices.
62	Meh	Nobody has taken responsibility for it. Different people market when they feel like it and have time - which is rare.	1,000–5,000	Releasing updates like new components that people are waiting and wanting to use.
63	We have such a mix bag of people really wanting to and loving the best practice examples we set, and others resisting it entirely.	Myself as Design Manager, and the other two senior leaders in our team, Head Of Engineering and Lead Product Owner, though the whole team helps us spot opportunities and with presentation/support content creation	More than 5,000	Our contribution model - when we opened the doors for this people really got engaged
64	Meh	Dont have one at this point?	200–1,000	consistency and accessibility.
65	Meh	Me, myself, and I.	1–50	I'm just answering to listen to the discussion, this is sort of a non-issue for me.
66	Meh	Experience Lead and Content Strategist	1,000–5,000	Shiny new thing... Fear of change! Technology advancements
67	Meh	For the company design system, it's the product owner. She seeks advice from product content designers on how to market the design system. For the content design system (a separate site), it's the co-leads of the content design system committee. They seek advice from marketing content designers.	50–200	Presentations at large internal meetings
68	So excited!	Tom (frontend engineer) & Amy (DS designer) are responsible for “marketing” the DS.	200–1,000	1) Initial socialization of DS in company wide Product Talk meeting. 2) Demos & socialization of governance & contribution models across product, design & engineering!
69	It's a mixed bag. Many of the designers are excited, the developers are somewhere between exasperated and excited, the leadership is meh, and some products never want to use it.	Me, Arko, I'm the product owner and the lead designer with some frontend experience.	50–200	Custom components and Theming capabilities - those are the most visually 'wow' things, and they travel far.
70		N/A		N/A
71	Meh	N/A	1,000–5,000	Creating a system that allows designers to focus more on solving problems and reduce dev time.
72	Our design system was removed from the code base last fall. 😢	Pat was responsible. He was the Frontend Team Lead.	1–50	n/a
73	So excited!	Taylor as well as the rest of the team.	200–1,000	Componets that will be accessible. Product owners, developers and designers like the idea that there will be components to use that require prop config over a full development of a component.
74	So excited!	We are all responsible for being advocates.		Improvement over past design systems.
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