The Four Quadrants of Design System Impact, with Ben Callahan

🎧 listen to Episode #14 with Ben Callahan on the Four Quadrants of Design System Impact, a great conversation on the current state of the systems world, and some predictions for the future.

Read on for a peek into the episode.

Ben Callahan joins Elyse for a fun conversation on creating impact with design systems. Ben shares insights from his consulting experience, discussing common pitfalls like organizations expecting a design system without adequately supporting their teams. They break down the "Four Quadrants of Design System Impact" framework, which breaks down tactical versus strategic work, helping teams avoid pitfalls like endless component creation. Plus, hear Ben’s predictions for the future of design systems.

🎧 The Four Quadrants of Design System Impact, with Ben Callahan — #14 (74min) – it’s a long one but a good one!

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Ben:

One of my customers said something to me this week that has stuck in my head all week. We were having a conversation about what's working and what's not working with their system.And they said to me, after some deep thought, they said, I think we want to have a design system, but we don't want to have a design system team.

Elyse:

Ooh.

Ben: 

And I was like, wait, really? Like, let me think about that.

I think that sentiment is something that I feel in a lot of these situations where it's like, it's easy to actually look at the sort of theoretical potential a system can give an organization, right?

Like, if we just stop using all these colors, we could consolidate. If we just did, the button, the, all the conversations you've had, efficiencies and accessibilities and consistency and all that, right? That's an very, actually, very easy, selling pitch to make. The reality though, is that you are going to every single team that is working on product inside of an organization, you're asking them to change how they work.

And so when you get into it, the muck of this work, it is literally just, it's waist deep mud of like people's baggage that you have to move through. And I think organizations get excited about those benefits. And you get into the work and you realize, wow, there's a lot of opinions, there's a lot of ideas, there's a lot of momentum around certain tech stacks, and reasons that nobody really understands the why we've chosen to do the things we're doing the way we are doing them.

And so all of that change is just really hard.

Elyse: 

And just simply the, the inertia of change. I've been saying that design system work is organizational behavior change and that is muddy and sticky and messy and hard, even in an organization that actually wants all of that change.

And not all of them do.

Ben:

Yeah, you're so right, and that's where my head is too. Like, I'm reading these books on like, how to create change in organizations. This is Kotter's book on Leading Change, some people would call it the Penguin book. It's like a pretty well-known book on organizational change. I'm fascinated with that part of the work.

And I think that we have spent the last 10 years as an industry really codifying the tactical implementation stuff. And that stuff, you know, we're getting good at that. I think there's still lots of interesting areas for work to be done there, but I think you could easily look at that and say, yeah, there's three or four different approaches that teams take with this work, and let's pick one and then let's, and then let's get to the hard work, which is like actually getting the org to want to use it.

Elyse:

What would you say, or what do you say, 'cause I imagine you encounter teams and people on design system teams who feel this way: I wanna work on the system, I wanna work on the tactical stuff. I wanna build the thing. I'm really excited about components and, you know, setting up the perfect system and like the perfect token architecture and just getting it right, like, I don't wanna be selling, I don't wanna have to come up with metrics to talk to my leadership. I don't wanna do all of this. What do you say to them?

Ben:

If you go look at a product designer role, do you ask that person to go sell the concept of the entire, like underpinnings of how they're doing the work, to the rest of the organization?

No, you don't ask that of them, right? They have a boss. They have a whole hierarchy of leadership that is in charge of having those hard conversations, and figuring out how the budget's gonna be split, and like opting to prioritize this kind of work. This is what I mean when I say, organizations don't know how to support these teams, right?

Like it's a team that just gets stuck underneath Design or Product or UX or Engineering, and they just are like, okay, fix all of the inconsistencies and do that for all the products. And it's like—

Elyse:

No problem!

Ben: Hold on a second!, you know?

Some people love that stuff and some people don't. And some people are good at it and hate it, and I think it's just, this is where balancing your team with folks who— somebody has to do that, right?

So if nobody's gonna do that work, then it's, I might even just say it's not even worth doing a full on design system if you don't have somebody who's gonna tackle that problem with you.

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See you next episode!,

Elyse