Design Leadership

The Politics of Design Systems

February 6, 2018
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Drupal Nights, Boston MA
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Conference Talk
Link to Slides:
https://www.slideshare.net/thezenkitchen/politics-of-design-systems

Rolling out a design system takes significant time and investment - one that many enterprises are reluctant to take on. What initially seems like the answer to achieving quality design at velocity quickly becomes a perceived bottleneck, as pieces of the system get rolled out slowly among the different products, and time and care needs to be spent making sure the codebase is stable, and the design elements can adapt to different use cases and design needs. How do you keep stakeholders from getting disgruntled? How do you keep the team motivated to keep working against the increasing pressures of executives, who can’t understand why things are taking so long?

In this session, you’ll learn how to:

* market and sell a design system into an organization

* make the case for continued investment

* set realistic expectations for stakeholders to avoid organizational panic 

This session is for you if you’ve ever wondered how to start or sell a design system within an organization, but you’ve had trouble getting buy-in from your stakeholders.