https://alistapart.com/article/selling-design-systems/
I’m willing to bet that you probably didn’t start your web career because you wanted to be a politician or a salesperson. But here’s the cold, hard truth, friend: if you want to work on design systems, you don’t have a choice. Someone has to pay for your time, and that means someone has to sell what you do to an audience that speaks value in an entirely different language.
It’s not exactly easy to connect the benefits of a design system directly to revenue. With an ecomm site, you can add a feature and measure the impact. With other conversion-based digital experiences, if your work is good, your customers will convert more. But because a design system is (usually) an internal tool, it’s just harder to connect those dots.
This article boils down the methods I’ve put into practice convincing executives not just to fund the initial push of design system work, but to keep funding it. I’ll share how I’ve adjusted the language I use to describe common design system benefits, allowing me to more clearly communicate with decision makers.
In my experience, design systems can be owned by information technology teams, marketing and communications departments, or (best case scenario) cross-disciplinary teams that bring many specialists together. The first thing you need to do is determine where the system lives, as in which department owns and cares for it.
If it’s part of IT, for example, you need to think like a CIO or an IT Director and speak to their objectives and values. These leaders are typically more internally focused; they’ll filter the value of the design system in terms of the employees of the company. In contrast, if the system belongs to Marketing, put on your CMO or Marketing Director hat. Marketing teams are often externally focused; they think in terms of B2B audiences and end users.
The way organizations structure the ownership of a design system can be more complex, but let’s use these two paths (internal vs external) as frameworks for building a persuasive case for those owners.
Based on the research we’ve done since 2018, there are three very specific internal motivators for having a design system:
Design systems allow for the rapid prototyping of new ideas using existing, production-ready components. They allow teams to reuse design and code, and they allow individuals to focus their creative energy on new problems instead of wasting it on old ones. Executives and decision-makers may abstractly understand all that, but you need to be able to tell them what it will take to realize the efficiency benefit.
There’s a theoretical maximum to how productive a team can be. When you talk about a design system creating more efficiency in your processes, you’re really talking about raising the ceiling on that max. As happens with so many things in life, though, that comes with a trade-off. Early on, while a team is actually building the system, they won’t be as productive on the rest of their work.
The efficiency curve looks like this:
Figure 1. With Productivity on the y-axis and Time on the x-axis, the Design System Efficiency Curve dips down at the start as the team ramps up on the system, but eventually surpasses standard productivity once the system is in place.