How to build a design system strategy you'll actually deliver

Successful design systems don’t happen by accident – they’re intentional, they have clear aims, and their team’s work is prioritised against shared goals. In short, they are underpinned by good strategies.

Over the past decade, I’ve helped lots of teams to define and deliver their design systems. In this post, I’ll share what I’ve learned about how to define a practical strategy and a clear action plan for delivering your objectives.

The advice I’m sharing here is applicable to teams and organisations of all sizes, whether you're just starting out, or evolving an existing design system to better meet the needs of its users.

What makes a good strategy?

It’s worth stating explicitly that a strategy is not a document, a roadmap or a presentation. Those things are representations of your strategy, but they only capture a particular moment in time. Good strategies are living things that should evolve with changing context, new information and accrued learning.

Good strategies are also created collaboratively and well-socialised. All of the questions I’ve suggested exploring below are designed to be answered in discussion with users, stakeholders, and anyone else with a vested interest in your design system.

What is the main problem we’re trying to solve?

Most organisations invest in creating or evolving a design system with a specific set of deliverables in mind – usually these are some combination of:

• a documentation website
• a design library, for example, in Figma
• a code library
• processes for supporting users and contributors of the system

However, when asked to think about why these artefacts and processes are needed, most organisations will cite the same generic objectives: speed, efficiency, consistency, scalability.

Good design system strategies are built towards context-specific goals. Getting clear on what your organisation needs from a design system is important for focusing time, money and effort in the right places, and avoiding wasteful activities.

Rather than focusing on the value you think design systems provide in general, work to identify a specific problem to solve, for example:

• how can we help designers and developers focus on context-specific challenges and improve the efficiency of our workflows?
• how can we support the introduction of a new public-facing brand and make it easier to update the aesthetic of our products, now and in the future?
• how can we make our design system legible to AI agents so that they can build products according to our vision, and design, technical and accessibility standards?

A clear problem statement provides a strong foundation for your strategy, giving you a north star against which to prioritise initiatives and audiences.

Who will use our design system?

Every design system has multiple different user groups, including:

• end users – the people who use the products the system is used to build
• primary users – typically the designers and developers who use the system to create experiences
• secondary users – people who benefit from the system without using it directly, for example, product managers

Within all of these groups sit subgroups, each with their own disciplines, seniority levels, skills and experiences.

To ensure your strategy is grounded in the needs of your system’s audience, take some time to map each user group and subgroup, capturing their:

• roles
• objectives
• motivations
• challenges
• attitudes

While this initial mapping may be based on assumptions, you can carry out user research to validate (or disprove) those assumptions and replace them with evidence-based insights.

Once you have some useful data, choose which needs or user groups to focus on.

Overlapping needs give helpful clues about opportunities for your system to make a widespread impact.

Where individual groups are particularly struggling, or are resistant to the idea of a design system, you may choose to concentrate extra effort on delivering value to bring them on board.

What are our 3 main priorities?

No design system team can solve every problem at once, and any effort to do so will only dilute its impact.

For this reason, the best design system strategies are highly focused, built on the understanding that a well-defined scope is the fastest way to deliver demonstrable value.

Concentrating on the next 6 months only, identify the 3 main priority areas for your design system. When selecting these, consider:

• urgency – does your organisation have a deadline-based objective that the design system can support with, for example, a new set of legal accessibility requirements to adhere to?
• importance – is there a strategically-important initiative that the design system can help to deliver, for example, a redesign or new platform?
• impact – where might your efforts be most impactful, for example, where could it make a difference to the largest number of people?
• interdependency – are there other internal initiatives that either necessitate or prevent work on a particular area?

Once you have 3 main priorities, you can bring your strategy together into a clear, actionable plan.

Which actions will help us deliver our priorities?

Taking each of your 3 main priorities in turn, you can now plan specific actions against them, which will form the basis of your roadmap.

As a rule of thumb, aim for at least 3 actions per priority area. For example, if one of your priorities was to improve the accessibility of your design system, you could plan the following actions:

1. Audit your design system against the current version of WCAG
2. Create a prioritised list of remedial actions to address the issues identified in the audit
3. Deliver the top 10 actions from your list

Assigning at least 3 actions against your 3 main priorities will give you 9 actions to concentrate on.

You can increase or decrease the number of priorities and actions according to your team size and the respective complexity of your chosen tasks.

However, here is where I’ll offer a word of caution. 10 years of working in this space has taught me that things nearly always prove more complex and time-consuming than teams initially assume.

The design system teams that earn credibility with their peers and leadership are the ones that do so by delivering their commitments, rather than making grand assertions about what they’ll do and then falling short.

If in doubt, err on the side of under-promising, and over-delivering.

Need more help?

If you’d like some more in depth support developing or refining your strategy, I offer:

• coaching for individuals and teams
• a one day strategy workshop for your organisation
• consultancy to support your team for a period of time

To discuss any of these, [drop me an email](mailto: amy.l.hupe@gmail.com).