I’m a design system consumer now: lessons from the other side, with Beau Ulrey

🎧 listen to Episode #07 with Beau Ulrey on lessons from working on both product and system teams

BTW — did you know that there’s a full transcript and chapter markers for every episode, so you can follow along and skip around at your leisure? 😘 You’re welcome.

Read on for a peek into the episode.

I invited Beau to the podcast because of his great Medium articles on design systems... but he's not working on a system team right now! Beau shares his experiences on both sides of the—fence? aisle?—and the lessons he's taken away. We chat about the tradeoffs of building for speed vs stability, bringing new designs for AI products into the system, onboarding, cross-team empathy, and why we're always complaining about the other side. Plus, find out what Beau wanted to be when he grew up.

🎧 I’m a design system consumer now: lessons from the other side, with Beau Ulrey — #07 (43:58)

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Beau Ulrey:

So a lot of the gaps are just in understanding like, what constraints is the system team under that they cannot help, and how could me, on the product team, potentially help with that?

Then on the system side, like what, what frustrations are people having with this and is there something we could do? Could we change our strategy? Trying to think through like, what are the problems on both sides? And what what could we do about it?

I think the worst case scenarios I've seen is like, people kind of dig their heels in, and they're unwilling to to explore new approaches. Or you know, the answer is no, but there's not really a path other than that, you just need to expand the thinking a bit.

Elyse:

Where do you think that digging your heels in attitude comes from?

I've talked a lot about this as like an incentives problem. But having experienced both, you know, maybe complaining about the design system when you're on the consuming team, or complaining about consuming teams when you're on the system team, where do you think that that… consternation between these two groups comes from, in real day to day experience?

Beau Ulrey:

I mean, full disclosure, I've complained about the design system team! And yeah, I know people complained about my team when I was on the design system team. It's okay. [laughter]

I think it does come down to a lack of understanding where the other team is coming from. And it is a mismatch of priorities that sometimes doesn't get clearly communicated.

So your system team, they're trying to standardize things. They're trying to make consistency happen. A lot of times the product teams are trying to move quick, get things out. They want to be able to just like look at that customer, what's their experience, make it better, next feature, or enhance that feature.

Honestly, that's not a bad thing!

It's just when the teams don't understand each other, it feels like you're pulling in different directions, versus working together.

That was a light bulb moment for me at U.S. Bank when I started reading about pace layers and [that] you don't move at the same speed. That's okay! Like, that's intentional.

You don't want to standardize things so quickly that they're actually not standardized at all, once you look under the hood. It takes time. You have to do it slowly, methodically. But how do you also let teams move quickly, or how do you let them tinker with the brand and try to change things?

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See you next episode!,

Elyse