We have one product, and are a team of four. Here’s why we need a design system anyway.

I was hired by my current company in October 2021 as a product designer. I joined another designer and a PM who has a good eye and decent design background. The other designer came on a few months prior to myself, and we brought on the third in December. He’s exclusively tasked with turning all desktop designs into mobile and based in India so there’s only once-a-week communication with him.

This is the first time the company has a design team, although it’s existed as a cloud-based product for over 5 years. Our front-end developers are self-taught. They’re natively back-end devs who learned as much about front-end work as they could. Our product isn’t perfect, but it does look good. They’ve kicked ass.

But, as we scale to a larger team and a larger product, and expand our market footprint (recently launched in Canada, and the UK and Australia are next on the list), we need a design system to stay in order. We currently have various styles of dropdowns. We have a type scale that, well, doesn’t follow any scaling rules. Our primary buttons… omg why do we have like six different styles? Why are all of our modals different sizes and why do some have an X to leave while others have a cancel button?

As you can see, our main reason for needing a design system is simply consistency for now, and to set us up for success (and efficiency) in the future as our product and team grows. Because we already use Figma for everything else, we’ll also be using them for the DSM.