Building Design Systems That Scale Across Products

Tokens first

Color, spacing, typography, and elevation tokens create a shared language. Document them in Figma and code simultaneously to avoid drift.

Component tiers

• Primitives: buttons, inputs, typography
• Patterns: forms, tables, modals
• Templates: dashboards, settings, onboarding

Governance without bureaucracy

A small design-system council approves breaking changes; squads can propose additions via RFCs and Storybook demos.

Documentation that ships

Storybook with usage guidelines, do/don't examples, and accessibility notes beats PDFs nobody reads.

Measuring adoption

Track component usage via static analysis or Storybook telemetry. Deprecate duplicates with migration codemods when possible.