Back
Design
Design Systems at Scale: Lessons from Building for 50+ Products
What we learned building and maintaining design systems across enterprise portfolios.
ML
Maya Lin
The Real Problem
Design systems don’t fail because of bad components. They fail because nobody agrees on what the system is for. Is it a component library? A design language? A governance framework? All three?
The system isn’t the Figma file. The system is the shared understanding of why things look and work the way they do.
What Scales
- Tokens over styles: Design tokens travel across platforms. CSS classes don’t.
- Constraints over options: A button with 3 variants ships faster than one with 12.
- Documentation over enforcement: Teams adopt what they understand, not what they’re told to use.
What Doesn’t
Trying to standardize everything at once. Start with the parts that cause the most inconsistency and the most support tickets. For most organizations, that’s typography, spacing, and color — not components.
The hardest part isn’t building the system. It’s getting 50 teams to trust it enough to delete their own solutions.