Design · 6 min · Deniz Yılmaz
When should you build a design system?
Built too early it's waste; built too late it's debt. Here's how we find the threshold.
Building a design system is usually an early investment for a team with a single product that is still looking for product-market fit. Once that same team reaches three products and four developers, the absence of a system turns into a visible cost.
How do you recognise the threshold?
- More than two different versions of the same component are in circulation
- A colour change has to be applied by hand in more than one repository
- Most of the time spent building a new screen goes into imitating the existing style
- Accessibility behaviour varies from team to team
If two of these signs are visible at once, it is time to build the system. Treating the work as a gradual effort that starts with the ten most-used components — rather than one big project to be finished in a single pass — noticeably improves the outcome.
