Thrivent hasn’t had a design system before. We were barely staffed, but had to find a way to support a re-org that created 6 product teams.
March 2022
2 Designers
November 2022
3 Designers
March 2023
3 Designers, PO, EM, 1 Lead Engineer, 2 Contract Engineers, a11y tester
It’s early 2022, all the engineering resources are going to different teams but no one is staffing ours. It’s a typical story.
Our direction? Build as much as we need to support the designers—we have control of that.
May 2022
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New team, who dis?
Houston, we have a problem
Unsurprisingly, without a dedicated engineering practice, engineers were recreating the components on their own in their own separate libraries. Our only way of pushing changes was waterfalling through the teams.
It went unnoticed until one engineer started causing problems for the other—I had to raise the flag to one of the engineering directors.
Mind you, I didn’t even have a director as this time.
We finally got attention
It took a lot of convincing, but I thankfully had advocates at the director level from other teams, who pressured leadership to staff my team. So we grew from a team of 3 designers to a team of 9 people.
People are still shared resources, but it’s a start.
Finally, a real design system
One of my biggest frustrations was perpetually explaining to a people that a design system is more than just a Figma UI kit. We finally have code that reflects our work and is tightly integrated with design tokens.Tokens, tokens, tokens!
But first, you’ve got to demonstrate why they’re valuable.