Shipping systems as a one person team with a dream 

A design system that needs to serve over 100 consumers within design and engineering, with no dedicated team. How? I was the only full time resource, with a part time engineering partner. We set up a working group – but it was volunteer time carved out of feature sprints, and when all the simpler components were out of the way, we ran into a challenge. 

I designed and wrote the documentation for all the components, but we still had a specific failure mode. Complex components like comboboxes, data tables, hierarchical pickers, filter groups actually being used in production. Things everyone needed, but no team could justify spending time to build properly. They ended up building fragile local versions, or scoped features down to avoid needing them at all. 

Without the headcount, I decided to adopt a gated federated model. The set up of which consisted: 

Design System Research Group (DSRG)
A cross-functional group of designers and engineers from feature teams who collaborate on research for complex initiatives, which is then handed off to the person who will build the component. 

Complexity triage
Not everything needed research. Simple components were groomed and built. Complex components were routed through DSRG first.

Explicit acceptance criteria
Along with sized contribution examples, so teams could scope their contributions into sprint planning. 

We ended up with 86 components, imported over 10k times, with a 200% YoY increase of use across platforms. This not only created consistency, but the library turned into a reference for how to build well, and not just a set of things to build with.