Design systems are promised as the ultimate productivity booster. “Build once, use everywhere.” And for the first six months, it’s true. You see the velocity of your feature teams skyrocket as they stop arguing about hex codes and start assembling pages from a library of pre-built components.

But as your team grows and your product evolves, the very system that was supposed to speed you up can start to slow you down. At work, we built a comprehensive Angular-based design system that initially reduced delivery time by 40%. However, as we scaled, we hit the “maintenance phase”—the point where the cost of consistency began to rival the cost of development itself.

In this post, I share the hard lessons we learned about the hidden taxes of a design system and how to keep it from becoming a bottleneck.

The “Rigidity” Trap

The most common issue with a mature design system is rigidity. When a system is young, it is flexible because it has few consumers. But once you have 50+ applications depending on a single Button component, making a “small” change becomes a high-stakes operation.

Imagine a product manager wants to change the padding on a primary button for a specific marketing campaign. In a world without a design system, this is a 5-minute CSS change. In a world with a rigid design system, it can become a multi-week ordeal:

  1. The Request: The team asks for a new “variant” or a “prop” to override the padding.
  2. The Debate: The design system team debates whether this change violates the “brand guidelines.”
  3. The Implementation: The change is made in the core library.
  4. The Release: A new version of the library is published.
  5. The Migration: Every team must now update their dependencies and run regression tests.

This is the Rigidity Trap. By trying to enforce 100% consistency, you inadvertently create a single point of failure for innovation.

The “Abstraction” Tax

Every component in a design system is an abstraction. And as we know from Leaky Abstractions, every abstraction has a cost.

When you wrap a native HTML <input> in a complex CustomInputComponent with built-in validation, icons, and state management, you are hiding complexity. But you are also creating a “tax” for every developer who needs to do something the abstraction didn’t anticipate.

If a developer needs to access a specific ARIA attribute or a native event that you didn’t expose through your @Input or @Output decorators, they are stuck. They either have to “hack” the component using ViewChild and native element access, or they have to wait for the design system team to update the abstraction.

At work, we found that developers were sometimes spending 30% of their time “fighting” the design system to make it do things that would have been trivial with plain HTML and CSS. This is the Abstraction Tax.

Governance vs. Autonomy: The “Federated” Model

The solution isn’t to abandon design systems, but to change how we govern them. Most organizations start with a Centralized Model, where a single team owns the library. This works for small teams but fails at scale.

We moved toward a Federated Model. Instead of one team being the gatekeeper, we treated the design system as an internal open-source project.

  • Core Tokens: The “atoms” (colors, spacing, typography) remained strictly governed.
  • Component Recipes: We provided “recipes” and base styles, but allowed teams to build their own specialized components if the core library didn’t meet their needs.
  • Contribution Pipelines: We made it easy for feature teams to contribute their components back to the core library.

This approach balances the need for consistency with the need for speed. It acknowledges that the people closest to the user (the feature teams) often have the best insights into what a component should actually do.

When to Say “No” to the System

One of the most important skills for a Lead Engineer is knowing when not to use the design system.

  • Experimental Features: If you are A/B testing a radical new UI, don’t bake it into the design system yet. Use “throwaway” code.
  • One-off Landing Pages: Marketing pages often need to break the rules to be effective. Don’t force them into the constraints of an enterprise dashboard system.
  • Internal Tools: Sometimes, a “good enough” UI that is built in half the time is better than a “perfect” UI that requires a library update.

Conclusion: Systems are for People

A design system is a tool, not a religion. Its goal is to empower developers and designers to build better products faster. If the system starts to feel like a burden, it’s time to refactor your governance, not just your code.

As we saw in our migration from React to Angular, the choice of tools and systems must always serve the strategic goals of the organization. Consistency is valuable, but it should never come at the cost of progress.

Further Reading & References

  • “Design Systems” by Alla Kholmatova: A foundational book on the philosophy and practice of building systems.
  • “Atomic Design” by Brad Frost: The methodology that started it all.
  • The “Leaky Abstractions” Essay by Joel Spolsky: Essential reading for understanding the cost of complex components.
  • The ‘Ship of Theseus’ Migration: Context on the environment where we built our Angular design system.
  • Nathan Curtis on Medium: One of the best resources for design system governance and team structures.