Design systems are a product, staff them like one
Northbeam's design system serves fourteen product teams with a team of nine. Priya Nair on running it with a roadmap, a support rota and adoption figures leadership actually reads.
- Thursday 10 June
- Day 2
- 11:40–12:20
- 40 minutes
- Main Stage
- Ground floor, hall A
- Talk
- Intermediate
Most design systems start as a side project: a few designers and engineers building shared components between other work. Then the company grows, more teams depend on it, and the side project becomes critical infrastructure with no roadmap, no budget and nobody whose job it is to say no.
Priya’s team at Northbeam serves fourteen product teams building accounting, payroll and HR software on web, iOS and Android. Three years ago it was two people and a backlog of three hundred requests. Today it is nine people with a quarterly roadmap, a weekly support rota, versioned releases and an adoption dashboard reviewed alongside the company’s other products.
Priya explains how she made the case for headcount, which roles she hired and in what order, how the team decides which requests to turn down, and the figures that convinced leadership the system was saving money rather than spending it.
What you will take away
- A staffing plan for a design system team, with the roles to hire first
- How to measure adoption and savings in terms leadership already uses
- An intake and support model that keeps product teams moving without swamping the system team
