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- All the things you shouldn’t do for design system success, with Dan Mall
All the things you shouldn’t do for design system success, with Dan Mall
more spicy takes per minute than any episode to date
🎧 listen to Episode #04 with Dan Mall on failed design systems, why design systems should be specific not generic, and the spiciest take on tokens yet.
Read on for a peek into the episode.
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I'm thrilled to have the one and only Dan Mall on the show, and in this episode, we get deep into all the things you maybe don't want to do if you want your design system to be successful. Dan shares his experiences with failed design systems, one very failed attempt at pitching a system to leadership, why design systems should be specific not generic, and maybe... not include foundations? Plus, we talk about useless documentation, what's next for systems, and THE spiciest take on tokens.
(Honestly, there are so many 🌶️ Spicy Takes™️ in this episode, we might have to rename the show to Design System Spicy Takes!)
💖 On Theme is a brand new podcast, so if you like what you're hearing, please hit subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, leave a rating or review, or share the show with someone! I love hearing your thoughts and questions, so to text the show or message me on LinkedIn and let me know what you think!
Elyse:
You probably get brought into organizations when their design system has quote unquote failed. Tell me what you tell teams when they're like, oh, we tried to do a design system it and it failed.
Dan Mall:
Yeah. My average is that most of the organizations I work with are on their, like, third or fourth try at a design system. And they considered it as, we failed three times, we don't want to fail the fourth time, so we're gonna bring in some help.
And so one of the first questions I ask is so what were the expectations?
Because failure or success are usually against a criteria. You can't just, generally fail at what life, I don't know? We failed at doing something in particular, or we succeeded at doing something in particular. So what was that something in particular?
A lot of teams don't have an answer to that. They're like, we failed at powering all of the UI that our company ships. Makes sense! So has every other company in the world!
Google has Material Design. It is the oldest, maybe most famous design system in the world. It's great. They've been working on it for 10 years. Not all of Google is powered by Material Design. I could pull up a bunch of Google products right now that aren't powered by Material Design.
Elyse:
And even the ones that are, it's not a hundred percent.
Dan Mall:
Exactly. There's some custom code in there. There's some forks. There's all sorts of different flavors of it. So whose expectation was that?
And a lot of times it is the teams themselves. They think that's what they're supposed to do. And then even worse, sometimes then they promise that.
That's the failure, failing to set the right expectations about what you could do, with a non-dedicated team, that only had one person on it for the last six months? Of course you didn't do that stuff. Who would be able to do that stuff?
Be kinder to yourself, set different expectations next time.
So one of the first things we do, is we go, what are we not going to do? What parts of the organization are we not gonna touch for the first year, or six months, or quarter, or whatever time frame we have? What are we gonna focus on? What are we not gonna focus on?
Let's give ourselves permission to do that by setting expectations with everybody else, that we're not gonna do that thing in this time frame. Then we can evaluate whether or not we succeeded or we failed.
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See you next episode!,
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