Design systems serve as the foundation of cohesive and efficient product development. These comprehensive sets of standards, components, and guidelines ensure consistency across a company's digital offerings, facilitating a unified user experience.

However, as businesses scale and diversify, managing a design system across multiple design teams or squads presents unique challenges that can lead to its failure over time.

This article explores the ideal governance model for a design system within a corporate business, the disciplines involved, the aspects of planning, and how to secure management buy-in.

The need for proper governance

A well-defined governance model is essential for successfully implementing and maintaining a design system, especially in organisations with multiple squads. Without it, companies risk creating disjointed user experiences, duplicating efforts, and wasting valuable resources.

Proper governance ensures that the design system evolves in a controlled, coherent manner, aligning with the business's broader goals and user needs.

Centralised vs. Federated models: A deep dive

Design leaders constantly debate whether adopting a centralised or a federated model is more efficient in creating and maintaining a design system. No organisation operates in the exact same way, but proper consideration must be given to the advantages and disadvantages of each model to tailor one's approach.

Over the years, we have seen companies attempt both models and witnessed when things went well and when the design system adoption started to fizzle out.

Centralised Model

A centralised governance model places responsibility for the design system within a single, dedicated team. This team oversees its development, maintenance, and governance and ensures consistency and quality across all products.

Advantages:

Consistency is effortlessly maintained, providing users with a seamless experience across all touchpoints.
Efficiency in decision-making and implementation streamlines the update process, reducing operational costs.
Quality control is centralised, allowing for high standards of design and functionality to be upheld.

Challenges:

Bottlenecks may occur as the centralised team becomes the sole gatekeeper for updates and improvements.
Reduced autonomy could demotivate squad-level designers, potentially stifling creativity and innovation.
Slower adaptation to specific product needs or market changes can delay the introduction of necessary updates.

Federated Model

The federated model disperses the responsibility for the design system across various squads, with a central body ensuring overall coherence. This model promotes autonomy while maintaining a unified design language.

Advantages:

Flexibility and autonomy allow squads to tailor the design system to their specific needs.
Scalability becomes more manageable as the organisation grows, with new teams integrating and adapting the design system independently.
Increased engagement from various squads fosters a sense of ownership, driving the system's continuous improvement.

Challenges:

Inconsistency risks could compromise the user experience if not adequately managed by the central oversight.
Coordination effort is heightened, necessitating robust communication channels and shared governance practices.
Quality variance among squad contributions may require additional oversight to maintain system-wide standards.

Implementing a governance model

Adopting a governance model that suits your organisation involves understanding your specific needs, challenges, and culture.

A hybrid approach, combining centralised oversight with federated autonomy, often yields the best results. This means keeping certain aspects of the system centralised (e.g., atoms and molecules) while giving squad designers the freedom to explore organisms that can later be integrated into the system.

This model leverages the strengths of both systems, ensuring consistency and quality while fostering innovation and responsiveness.

Key steps for implementing a hybrid governance model:

Define clear roles and responsibilities: Establish who is responsible for maintaining, contributing to, and using the design system.
Set up a contribution process: Create a transparent and structured process for squads to propose, review, and integrate changes.
Implement version control and documentation: Ensure all components and guidelines are well-documented and versioned.
Establish a governance council: Form a council with representatives from across squads to oversee the system's evolution and resolve disputes.
Regular review and adaptation: The governance model and the design system should be periodically reviewed to adapt to new challenges and opportunities.

Disciplines that form the Design Systems Guild

Successful design systems rely on the collaboration of multiple disciplines, each contributing its expertise.

Product Design

Contributes to developing the design system's components and guidelines, ensuring they meet user needs and support a cohesive user experience.

Engineering

Works closely with the design team to implement design system components in code, ensuring they are technically efficient and maintainable.

Product Management

Ensures the design system aligns with business goals and product strategies, advocating for its role in delivering value to users and the business.

Copywriting

Develops and maintains content guidelines within the design system to ensure consistency and clarity in messaging across all user touchpoints.

These contributors will also engage with other departments within the organisation to ensure patterns and copy comply with legal requirements which may be related to the industry or country in which the company operates.

The role of DesignOps

DesignOps, or Design Operations, can play an important role in the efficient management and scalability of design systems within organisations. Their key responsibilities include:

Streamlining design processes to improve efficiency and consistency across teams.
Enhancing collaboration between designers, developers, product managers, and other stakeholders to ensure the design system is effectively integrated and utilised across products.
Participating in planning and prioritisation sessions with other squads.
Allocating resources, including budget and personnel, to support the design system's development and maintenance.
Ensuring the right tools are in place and that the design system is well-documented and accessible, facilitating its adoption and adherence across the organisation.

Planning and prioritisation of the Design System's backlog

Effective design system maintenance requires collaborative engagement between the core design system team and the various squads or teams across the organisation. This collaboration ensures that the design system's backlog—comprising updates, new components, and improvements—is aligned with the needs and priorities of different product areas.

The quarterly planning cycle

Most organisations will review their backlog every quarter. These planning cycles offer a structured approach to assess, prioritise, and schedule work across the different squads; as a result, they inform the priorities of the design system.

This timeframe strikes a balance between providing enough flexibility to respond to emerging needs and maintaining a strategic focus on long-term goals. The steps involved in the quarterly planning process include:

Gathering input: Collecting feedback, requests, and suggestions from all squads regarding the design system. This can involve reviewing the existing backlog, conducting workshops, or holding one-on-one meetings to understand the diverse needs across the organisation.
Assessment and prioritisation: Evaluating the gathered inputs based on criteria such as impact on user experience, alignment with business goals, technical feasibility, and resource availability. This phase often requires negotiating trade-offs and finding the optimal balance between different priorities.
Roadmapping: A roadmap for the upcoming quarter is developed based on the prioritisation, outlining the key initiatives and tasks to be undertaken. This roadmap should be flexible enough to accommodate unforeseen needs or adjustments.
Communication and alignment: The planned roadmap should be shared with all stakeholders to ensure visibility and alignment. This step is crucial for managing expectations and fostering a sense of ownership and collaboration across the organisation.
Review and adaptation: At the end of each cycle, review what was accomplished versus what was planned and reflect on the lessons learned. This review informs the planning for the next cycle, enabling a process of continuous improvement.

The importance of flexibility

While the quarterly planning cycle provides a structured framework, it's important to maintain flexibility to adapt to unexpected changes or urgent needs that arise. A successful design system evolves in response to user feedback, technological advancements, and shifting business priorities.

Why plan in conjunction with the broader organisation?

Regular planning and prioritisation ensure the design system remains aligned with users’ and business's current and future needs. Organisations can make the most efficient use of their limited resources by prioritising initiatives based on impact and feasibility. Engaging with different squads in the planning process encourages a culture of collaboration and shared ownership of the design system.

Securing top management buy-in

Gaining the support of senior management is crucial for the resources and prioritisation needed for a design system.

Initially, top management may have a perception gap regarding the nature and role of a design system. Often seen merely as a library of UI components and guidelines, its strategic importance and potential to drive business value might be overlooked.

The first step in bridging this gap is elevating the conversation around design systems, framing them as strategic assets that, like any product, require investment, management, and continuous evolution to support the changes and improvements such products require.

Here are some ways of securing management buy-in:

Demonstrate business value and strategic alignment

Illustrating the alignment between the design system and the organisation’s strategic objectives is crucial. This involves showcasing how a well-maintained design system directly contributes to achieving efficiency in the development process, reducing time to market, ensuring consistency across the product ecosystem, enhancing user experience, and ultimately supporting the organisation’s growth, customer satisfaction, and innovation goals. By linking the design system’s evolution to the broader business strategy, its role as a product in its own right becomes clearer to management.

Articulate the need for continuous improvement

Just as the main product requires ongoing iteration and enhancement to remain relevant and competitive, so does the design system underpinning it. Communicating this necessity involves presenting the design system as a foundational layer that must adapt and grow in response to external pressures and the internal needs of the product teams it serves.

Sharing successes and learnings

Nothing speaks louder than success. Sharing concrete examples of how the design system has already positively impacted the organisation—through faster time to market, reduced development costs, improved user satisfaction, and so forth—can be a powerful tool in illustrating its value. Additionally, discussing learnings from past iterations, including what worked, what didn’t, and how these insights have informed future development, can demonstrate the proactive management and strategic thinking involved in overseeing the design system as a product.

Advocating for a design-led culture

At the heart of this dialogue is the advocacy for a design-led culture that recognises the integral role of design in achieving business success. This includes emphasising how a design system, as a product, embodies this ethos by facilitating a more efficient, cohesive, and user-centred design and development process. It's about painting a vision for a future where design is not just a service to the main product but a strategic driver of innovation and differentiation.

Conclusion

The governance of a design system in a corporate environment requires a delicate balance between control and freedom, backed by stakeholder collaboration and management buy-in.

Businesses can implement a hybrid governance model that fosters consistency and innovation by carefully considering the advantages and challenges of centralised and federated models.

As organisations continue to evolve, so too should their approach to design system governance, ensuring that it remains aligned with their overarching goals and responsive to their users' needs.

Need help?

If you want to hear more about Design Systems governance and how Atlanttico can assist your business, please get in touch.

Implementing a successful Design System governance

The need for proper governance