EXT Episode 003, Raw Data

Thanks for your interest in The Question!

Sign up to participate in future questions here.

This file is the raw data from Episode 003. You can check out the Episode 003 FigJam file, watch Episode 003 on YouTube, or read the Episode 003 Wrap-up Post!

Major thanks to zeroheight and Sparkbox for their sponsorship of The Question this week.

-----

I’ve spoken to design system teams of all sizes and structures. Some are very large and fully dedicated, some are a single person hoping for others around the organization to help out. This week, I’d love to know how large your team is and a little about who you feel you’re missing.

There are three simple questions:
1. How many people are dedicated to your design system team?
2. What role do you feel is most missing from your design system team (and why)?
3. What is your personal primary discipline?

Question 1: How many people are dedicated to your design system team?

Question 2: What role do you feel is most missing from your current design system team (and why)?

Question 3: What is your personal primary discipline?

9–15

Development
In the last reorg we lost half of our development capacity. In some sprints we have zero dev capacity for the DS as we have other projects assigned to us.

Design

21–30

UX research (had one but was moved to another team).

Design (previously software development).

5–8

A single leader, instead of multiple. Often design and dev decisions are being made based on their individual values. For example, design wants flexibility and dev wants consistency so sometime in design components are broken into atoms where in dev that are more complex molecules. This doesn't serve anyone and definitely doesn't help to create the shared language that enables better collaboration for feature teams. In a previous role, I led both disciplines and we operated much closer with more aligned decision making and stronger outcomes.

We have a solid UI Kit and a CSS framework that helps engineers replicate designs without having to write CSS themselves but we need an engineer to spearhead a component library and help transition older parts of the app onto the system.

Front of the frontend

5–8

Junior cross-functional designers. Our team has morphed into a seasoned team of specialists. We need more crossing of workstreams and more folks who design a component from beginning to end.

Note: The quantity listed is just on the design side. We have had our tech partners reallocated to other work - so in reality we need them most! But, that is not in our control whereas design resources are. Design and tech are staffed separately.

Design

5–8

Project Manager. As implementation expands, support requests increase, and more maintenance is required, a PM would be very useful.

PS. Thanks for all you do Ben!

UX Development

9–15

We are lucky to be staffed the way we are in that we have all the main disciplines covered however we are missing some devs. While we have 12 people on the team they are not all 100% dedicated to the Design System. It would be very helpful to have at least 1 more developer who is dedicated to the DS.

Product Manager for the Design System- managing strategy, customer requirements & feedback, DS backlog, marketing and communications.

9–15

PM, currently I as Design manager is doing all the Design System as product planning and metrics.

Product Design

2–4

Design system engineer, we have to ask for development resources from a supporting team and our work has a low priority in their roadmap.

Design system designer primarily for mobile apps.

9–15

Content Specialist - we're currently recruiting for this role. At the moment, designers do documentation - but facility with the written word isn't their forte. We need both a strategic view on the creation of documentation, and a dedicated resource to do this, and the specific skillset to editorialise and uplift the work contributed by other team members, or facilitate documentation from non-core design system team members.

We also need dedicated resource to put behind our general communications strategy, so this doesn't sap the focus time of the designers that we really want focussed on generating UI component outputs and providing hands on support to subscribers.

Hopefully, we will have this role filled soon.

What we don't yet have agreed as a permanent resource for the team is a dedicated Researcher. (We had some resource allocated to us previously from the horizontal research capability for the overall business unit, but that particular researcher left her post and we have not been allocated a permanent replacement). Our designers will have to conduct their own research as it relates to component delivery. But they won't have the bandwidth to do system-wide research, and things like an adoption or sentiment subscriber survey.

Product Management (design background)

2–4

It depends on the client, scope, and project situation. Tends to be technology is not always fully allocated to the DS work, instead it is something they do alongside other development work.

I am a group director of Experience Design of our agency's design system practice - my discipline is UX / UI. I oversee DS work on multiple clients as well as internal DS and tools & resources to support DS work across the agency.

2–4

A DS product manger/owner, we're having to lead, organise, maintain, evolve & advocate a DS all at once which often times can leads us in circles

A blend of Graphic & Product design

5–8

I think a role related to triage and trafficking is most missing. I don't even know if this is an official role, and I suppose to some degree tooling could solve for parts of it. I find myself spending a large amount of time just trying to triage incoming requests, determine who is working on what, connect different teams and work, providing feedback and reasoning, and prioritizing all of it. Because of this, I'm not designing, focusing on strategy, or much in the way of proactive work — it's nearly all reactive.

I don't know if a project manager is a 1:1 with these functions, but I'd be curious to know if other design system teams have a PM, or how they handle this part of system work.

If primary can include multiple things, then it's everything design system related: UI design, iconography and illustration, accessibility, and strategy.

5–8

Research

Engineering

2–4

Project/Product Manager

Design System Engineer

Grassroots effort. There are 3-4 dedicated people on a platform specific angular component library but no dedicated resources for an enterprise wide DS approach (yet!) We have 4-5 people committing part time effort for now.

Dedicated resources. Probably engineering is the biggest need cause we have a few designers interested in auditing things in figma and building components but only one developer looking into web components for multi platform support.

Front End Development. Designer turned developer.

2–4

UX Writer

Frontend engineer

2–4

An engineer for Native to replicate the current feature team structure

Designer

Borrowed 1.5 resources for a couple of quarters. Also ended up getting a crowd of people on the design systems Slack channel and crowdsourced a lot of work.

Program management. As a manager/lead, freeing me from scheduling so I can collaborate with other teams would be amazing.

Engineering management.

I think having more people on the team can help delegate the amount of work. Currently in the sole design systems person maybe including my mentor.

My discipline background is graphic design but focusing on design systems the last several months which have been a great experience.

9–15

Community specialist

Design

5–8

what is missing:
a content design/ux writing specialist

Our system is missing high level documentation and guidance on UX content practices, microcopy and accessible writing

current team set up:
Sr Product Designer
Jr Product Designer
3 developers

My primary discipline is visual design. I was a graphic designer for 18 years focused on "web design" in the early 2000's, branding and advertising and transitioned straight to design system work 2 years ago.

More than 30

UX writers. We have a really small team taking care of documentation cans design content.

Product design.

9–15

Design system designers. Right now my designer-dev ration is 1-12. Me being the only designer (also UX Engineer) with 12 'full-stack' devs. All we are doing are shipping features. I can't design for everything we are shipping so components are being enhanced, refactored, and built from scratch without my involvement. Resulting in poorly architected, designed, and coded components w/ missing features and really poor UX and A11y compliance. Then these components aren't built in Figma.

I need more help to weather the storm, do things right, and builder higher-quality DS bits.

I've been a hybrid Web/UX/UI/Product Designer and Front-of-the-front end engineer (UX engineer / Design Technologist) my entire 20+ year career. Also, past 7yrs doing more Product Management and running DS teams.

2–4

A technical lead because we have an Engineering manager and 2 ICs but nobody really has previous experience architecting a design system platform.

I'm a hybrid (design, front-end). I'm technically a Principal designer, leading the Design system.

21–30

Educator/Trainer.

There's not enough focus on the people who use the system. The team thinks creating components and documentation is enough.

Consumers, or potential consumers (most people don't consume the design system), need personalized, interactive, engaging training materials to understand what a design system is and what the best practices are.

I have advocated on educating and advocation roles for a long time, but leadership thinks creating more components and foundations will drive adoption better.

Inclusive Design

16–20

Research

Designer

2–4

I feel like we are missing program or product manager role and design research role. Currently we have and one principle designer (not fully dedicated to design system team, offer vision to everything related to design and delegation, work mostly involving in employee resource groups). One senior UI designer works on one platform (not fully dedicated to design system team, created the first style guide for UX team, provides historical context and insights regarding the design and branding). One DesignOps role (not fully dedicated to design system team, work sometimes involving in vendor projects and component [not coded] fixes and updates). One staff UX developer (role in tech division, dotted line with the UX team).

My primary discipline is to support and assist designers and researchers’ request regarding maintaining and fixing components. And I also sometimes get assigned to vendor projects and research work.

There’s a senior design lead in the platform team whose part of responsibilities (aside from manage people and projects) is managing design systems.

At least 2 designers from each vertical must be appointed as part of the DS team (but designers can volunteer themselves and rotate every 6 months so everyone will have their turn).

Working well so far, not much missing. Always nice ti have a dedicated DS ops, but having this person might mean longer time to convey context, so its a trade off we’re willing to take.

Engineers contribution, as they’re just seeing the benefits so not many dedicated / appointed roles yet

Not quite sure what this question mean… so not sure how to answer.

it was a bottom-up idea to work on the design system. So it started as a 'hobby' and has not really changed so far...Since we already have a collection of guidelines and UI libraries, rules which could serve as a 'design system', its not very easy to ask for more resources ('we already have some working system, why do we want more time? we have bigger resource problems...')
But we designers have the feeling that is very far from the industry standard design systems.

we dont have any dedicated time, we are always overloaded with other projects.

Product design (UX/UI)

5–8

Product owner - we simply have no single person driving the work and making decisions. It is a collaborative, volunteer effort.

I focus on the infusing the brand into the UI, along with design specs.

The design system is a secondary initiative alongside a larger re-platform effort. Resources are shared between the core team, including myself, and design system tasks are a part of the whole but tracked as its own project.

Dedicated resources in general.

Because it is a secondary project, it is commonly delayed or not given as much focus due to its status. A dedicated handful of people could help establish it faster and with better focus instead of having a split mindset and bias (toward the core project / tech stack) while developing.

I am a front-end developer (12 years) turned UX-er (6 years) who is slowly shifting into Product Design / Ownership (~2 years) - so a general mixture of the 3 core disciplines. I enjoy being well-rounded enough to focus within the Design System / Design Ops space.

16–20

Figma librarian - we used to have one on our team and they would manage our entire system in Figma

UX Design

16–20

Someone responsible for Design Ops (spanning the gap between Design and Dev). I've found these stakeholders to be very useful in the past.

I think of myself as a generalist (when it comes to Design). UX, UI, even UXR, I like to keep my bredth and set of skills wide.

16–20

UI design engineer

Product designer

2–4

Communication

2–4

Project Management

Director, Product Design

5–8

no role missing, just more design resources would be nice (would be always nice :D)

design

Only contributor to a team of 1 designer for now. Earliest stage startup.

All 😂

Product design

5–8

Program Manager - essentially someone that can coordinate the team do the admin side, generally connect the dots!

Design Lead

2–4

Evangelista .. no time to get the word out due to product priority.

ux manager: design and research

2–4

I think we need a usability or accessibility person on our design system team. Currently, the designs that are produced look nice, however, the usability can be improved. I believe we can create components that both look beautiful and are accessible. For example, having someone from the design team who also took into account things like the hover and focus states for interactive elements, along with implementing designs that meet color contrast ratio requirements, just to name a few.

I am a Software Developer who is passionate about accessibility and component libraries. I used to help manage the component library at my previous employer. Although I didn't create the design system, I was one of the engineers who implemented it. Through that process, I learned how starting from a solid design system foundation can equip the organization to iterate faster.

2–4

The time, resources, or people to build out the needs of the design system

Experience design

2–4

A designer with the ability to take into account product, development, and design when making decisions.

Developing shared understanding and passion among team members through training and mentoring. However, although an individual can grow into a valuable member of a team, hiring a specialist can make a substantial difference in ensuring business and team needs are met.

The design system team requires self-driven, passionate individuals who can work well as a team. It's probably because of the team's nature. When it comes to cross-functional teams with OKRs, it's not exactly the same situation. At least in my case, we need indevisuals who have a passion for this field and are willing to go the extra mile to advance the team.

16–20

The biggest missing area in my team would have to be around design tooling. Having a person who can help us create custom Figma plugins and other design tooling to help us work smarter and faster. There are so many opportunities for us to create less friction within the design system if we had a design technologist or UX engineer dedicated to design tooling. We have a pretty good sized team so this is a pretty niche ask but I see it as a big trend in the system space and we’re not taking advantage of it.

I’m the design lead so I have both manager and IC responsibilities.

Currently we do not have any role specifically dedicated to the system itself. We have a contribution cadence where designers propose and discuss the system amongst the broader team, but all designer & engineering roles take on system development & documentation as their bandwidth allows. There is a singular role that focuses heavily on system work to move it forward, but that role also has seperate product specific work to manage.

A team or resources that are specifically dedicated to the governance, evolution, development, and documentation of the design system.

Product Designer

5–8

Content Designers

5–8

Someone dedicated or specialist in tokens or to structure tokens in a strategic way.

Product designer

5–8

Dedicated Engineering Resources, in the Design System team.

Lead Design Technologist

5–8

Product - We do not have a product manager/owner that reports up through our product org.

This role would help us to build relationships and ownership of the design system within our product organization. Tactically, this role would also help drive the program (in partnership with design/tech leads) of our system, lifting many of the project management duties off of my plate.

These days mostly strategy and program management, people leadership, and occasionally getting my hands dirty with some component design/build work.

I'd consider myself a UI/UX/Interaction designer by trade.

I'm not involved in any project at the moment, so I'll take my previous team as an example.

Our team had never heard of design systems until some point. Nobody thought about implementing something like this. We were developing our product, adding new features, etc. As you would expect, our project was getting bigger and bigger, so we as developers started having problems with common patterns, changes, and so on.

Then React came into our lives and helped us change the way we think about development and use a component-based approach. So we felt like we could organize our codebase in a more structured way. We started to develop our first common components library with most used components. Of course we had to find solutions for our technical challenges to make it usable.

Then, during another redesign, someone on the design team read about design systems, then started conversations on the topic, and the developers started reorganizing the component library to make it a real design system (adding colors, margins, etc). At the same time, the designers began creating their first version of the design system, so we had to follow their changes. We worked closely together, learned and made mistakes together.

We didn't have that concept of a design system in our minds, so I think this is the reason why we didn't have a dedicated team for it. Everyone did their best to improve the product, that was the idea behind. Over time we had people who worked more closely with the design system and others who almost never did it. Anyway, it was more about the needs of a particular team you are in and about particular teammates people who were always happy to deal with the design system.

In the end, I think it worked. We had a fairly useful and quite stable design system.

From a developer perspective, I think we lacked people responsible for changes and stability. If you don't have a responsible person, then when you have system design task which is not specific to your particular team and doesn't have much impact from a business perspective, then it is really difficult to find time to complete the task.

I'm a frontend developer

5–8

Speaking from my last role here. I've been on design system teams with dedicated team members of up to 40 including engineers (i am guessing because the team was so big). My last role didn't have a fully dedicated team but my lead designer was dedicated to creating the design system and my junior contributed through coaching. We had 8 developers and they all contributed to the design system through stories. For example, if we were working on a new feature we would add the relevant pieces of the design system to the website at that time. This way we slowly released it without taking up too much bandwidth. It also took us a great deal of time to release a new component because we were making them usable by Marketing on the front-end in Contentful.

My primary discipline is product design. However, I have developed my component library for my Master's Thesis and have helped established new design systems several times. My last 3 or so years I've been more and more into leadership positions so less in the weeds. I do help coach my teams and guide them so that the system works well.

5–8

Yes.

No but really it’s capacity. We have a good mix but we need more of… everything.

Front end engineering

2–4

A brand designer who speaks design system and design tokens.

Overall experience design VP with background in product design, graphic design/aesthetics, and UX research.

2–4

Writer, Given that the documentation is the just as important as the design and coded assets it should have a dedicated person to ensure it's quality meets the bar.

Engineer

9–15

Most of the desired roles are covered on the team. We have most skill-sets represented. Personally, I wish we had a PM that could do some workshops with our team on certain kinds of meetings (prioritizations, retros, etc), but I think the team does not feel that we need that service at this time.

Design

5–8

Unsure. Experienced systems designer?

Dev manager / Front-end and Design system

5–8

We currently have:
- Design director (myself)
- Senior product designer
- Senior product designer
- Content designer (50% DS work)
- Eng manager
- iOS engineer
- Android engineer
- Web engineer

Our current need is a product manager, and there are a few reasons for this. Our company has such a strong product management culture and we see a huge value for someone to sit alongside other PMs and advocate for product infrastructure (including DS) that will move the business forward. We have the design representation, and we have Eng representation, but we’re missing that third leg of the stool. This trifecta also taps into our product org culture and the PDE relationship is what is widely know to lead other teams to cross-functional success.

Getting a PM would also allow myself as the design director and the EM, to focus on craft, contribution, community, etc, while more of the day-to-day team management is handled by the PM. I fully believe this would help us build a better design system and product infrastructure culture across our company and ensure it’s health for years to come.

We are big fans of Maya Hampton and the role they play on the REI team (we’re also jealous and would love to have a similar person on our team)

Design

2–4

Program/Product Manager. Someone to drive the roadmap, execution and planning for upcoming work.

UX Design

5–8

Developers.

Operating federated due to budgeting but this naturally impacts the team’s capacity for direct change and evolution within the system, makes things slower as work is absorbed by XF teams. Also means we are going to be competing with larger business objectives to ensure direct support.

This operating model that was created before I joined which means there is work to show value and build back up the resourcing support/capacity and business buy-in during a phase of cuts. The new centralised team of designers has grown from 2 to 5 since Feb.

Design & Product

100