If you google “design system”, here might be the most accurate and comprehensive explanation:“Design system is a group of elements that allows team to design, realize and develop a product. Design system is not a single deliverable, but a set of deliverables. It evolves constantly with the developments of products, tooling, and technology.”

At Greator, we are developing a series of core product filings in the pipeline of the customer funnel. The product and team behind are scaling with such fast pace and big scale day by day, thus the design consistency, the product scalability, the work efficiency is encountering a big challenge by the lack of design system guides. As such, initiating a design system is bought upon the design team’s roadmap.

A buy-in design system consumes abundant resources and time for maintenance, guidance, and needless to mention it’s a live system with constant growth. Additionally, the scope is way beyond design team, on which the whole product team, from POs to Devs has a huge impact.

Together with the benefits and challenges, the idea to launch a design system MVP popped up after several kick-offs with key stakeholders. The trick of  MVP ( Minimum viable product ) a cross-functional team to start light, move fast, and prevent scope creep.

A comprehensive design system could be broken down into 2 parts:
Part i: DESIGN COLLECTION
Part ii: PEOPLE ( STAKEHOLDER, TOKENS, WORKING PROCESSES )

Staring from part l, the design team, with business goals and marketing benchmark research, we list out the top 10 assets with their impact on the product. As entitled Design System MVP, the collection is focusing on Look&Feel

A design system without people applying to the work is a dead end. As an MVP, we don’t immediately bring all the team onboarding. Rather, we focus on the minimal amount of people with the biggest impact across the teams.

- A design leader to drive the design system MVP
- design team to governorate  and update collections
- A developer leader to be benefitted from design systems in a prior role
- A developer fanbase to connect and bring the influence on the whole dev. team

We started small. Nevertheless, nurturing an MVP scope and bring it to reality is not easy already. There is constantly open debates going on between designer and dev, like two fighting kitties.
Eventually, we nailed it! 
However, Like the design, like product management, like development, a design system is never done. There is going to more work, harder and tougher work to be done. But the benefits also follow by, and they are going to multiply since. Keep it going!