Dear (none)Designer,
Welcome back to the fifty-fourth Design at Scale™ Newsletter – where we explore innovation and how design sparks real change in large organisations and agencies.
We often see references to the design system as the 'brain' of the organisation. Unfortunately, this misleading analogy can result in significant miscommunication within the business, leading to negative impacts on products and services that are developed in silos and not overseen by the relevant parties.
If we assume the design system is the brain, we must also agree that everyone is following what is in the design system, and that this source of truth is neither changing nor evolving. Regrettably, some design systems do operate in this way, with very slow change policies. As a result, the impact on related products and services is minimal—often due to regulation or internal politics within the organisation.
Fortunately, some organisations perceive the design system as a blood vessel, delivering the right message to the appropriate party. Stretching the muscle prompts the blood vessels to arrive and support the movement. In this way, we can observe the distribution of tokens and their classification within a solution's architecture, delivering value at the time and place it is most needed. This occurs in three distinct phases.
- During the initial deployment, all parties contribute to the first iteration or release of the design system. In this phase, designers, developers, and product owners have eyes on release number one. Everything is new, and it is expected that all components will work as intended. This collaborative approach enables the development of pages, templates, components, and containers in whichever way is deemed appropriate, as it marks the first iteration of the entire proposition.
- After approximately three to six months, the design system will have collected feedback in the form of bugs and identified items that need to be deprecated. At this stage, we move into the optimisation phase, which involves two streams: one focusing on new builds, and the other concentrating on maintenance and the adoption of the desired changes in the production line.
- Following a further three to six months, we reach the so-called acceleration phase. This allows all parties to understand not only the impact of the design system, but also the 'blood flow'—where and how the design system provides the most support.
Understandably, this is not merely a source of truth, but also the delivery mechanism of that truth across the organisation, empowering every designer, developer, product owner, business analyst, and even accountant to understand why we do what we do and where to find the references for it.
In a design-matured agile organisation, these three phases—mobilise, operate, and accelerate—happen relatively quickly and typically do not take more than three months each. In contrast, a traditional business that relies on spreadsheets and rigid project plans may take 18 to 24 months to deliver the first benefits of this 'blood vessel' approach after two years of integrated development.
It is often considered a fantasy that this process could be expedited even further. However, there is evidence of design teams within large organisations separating themselves from the main chain of command and forming so-called 'design units' to create new products or services using the new design system. These experiments often take less than three months, including the integration into the main structure.
However, it is important to note that after the well-recognised success of releasing version one, version two usually takes another year. Why is this?
This is because two completely different mental models of delivery are trying to find a way to work together and reflect on each other's basis for delivery, which inevitably impacts the timing and overall duration of the project.
For more information, please visit Designa at Scale™ – GRID Magazine, where you can find additional relevant articles that explore high-performing teams, self-organising teams of 001, teams of 010, and teams of 100 that deliver the value proposition within a product-led environment.
