A Codebase and a Community

I woke up one morning and realized that I had it all wrong. I discovered that code and design are unable to solve every problem on a design systems team, even if many problems can be solved by coding and designing in a dark room all day. Wait, huh? How on earth does that make any sense? Well, that’s because good design systems work is about hiring, too.

Let me explain.

First, let’s take a look at some common design systems issues. One might be that your components are a thick div soup which is causing issues for users and is all-round bad for accessibility. Another issue might be that you have a large number of custom components that are fragile and extremely difficult to use. Or maybe you have eight different illustration styles and four different modal components. Maybe you have a thousand different color values that are used inconsistently.

Everyone in an organization can typically feel these problems but they’re really hard to describe. Folks can see that it takes way longer to build things than it should and miscommunication is rampant. Our web app might have bad web performance, major accessibility issues and wildly inconsistent design. But why is this? What’s the root cause of all these dang problems?

The strange thing about design systems is it’s difficult to see what the root cause of all these inconsistencies and issues might be. And even the answer isn’t always entirely obvious once you see the problem.

A design systems team can write component documentation to fix these issues, or perhaps refactor things, audit patterns, refactor even more things, redesign components, and provide training and guidance. But when apps get to a certain size then one person (or even a whole team of people) tackling these problems isn’t enough to solve them.

Sure a design systems team can spend a whole bunch of time helping fix an issue but is that really the best use of their time? What if they convinced another team in the company to instead hire a dedicated front-end engineer to build a sustainable working environment? What if they hired an illustrator to make things consistent and ensure high quality across the entire app?

This is why design systems work is also about hiring.

A design systems team is in the perfect place to provide guidance around hiring because they’ll be the first to spot issues across an organization. They’ll see how components are being hacked together or where there’s too many unnecessary custom components that are not part of a library or style guide. The design systems team will see weaknesses in the codebase that no one else can see and they can show which teams are missing which particular skill sets — and fix that issue by hiring folks with skills in those specific areas.

If you're in management and don’t see all those inconsistencies every day, then it’s likely nothing will get done about it. We're unlikely to fix the issues we cannot see.

So as design systems folks, we ultimately need to care about hiring because of this: a codebase is a neighborhood and a community.

And the only way we can fix the codebase is by fixing the community.

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