The Cost of Consistency: Avoiding Design System Bottlenecks
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. ...