#48 Managing Design System Projects
Varya started her career as a Frontend Developer and was always passionate and engaged in working with design & frontend components before design systems were invented. At some point, she decided to use her knowledge and focus on helping companies and the community to build design systems in the right way and understand their value.
In this episode, Varya talks about how to manage a design project in the most structured way and how to convince senior leadership teams of its value based on data.
Follow Varya:
Website: https://varya.me/
Design system course: https://hands-on-workshop.varya.me/
Linkedin: @varyastepanova
Twitter: @varya_en
Table of content
00:30 - Episode intro
01:50 - Intro Varya
04:10 - Engineering vs. design mindset
06:30 - Best timing to build a design system
08:50 - How to allocate resources & focus
11:05 - Kicking off the project
17:30 - Communicating & aligning across the organization
21:55 - Convincing Senior Leadership Teams
26:35 - Design systems vs. creativity
28:30 - Biggest mistakes companies do with design systems
32:45 - Varya's design system course
How did you transition from being a software developer to a design systems expert?
Varya: Hi guys and thank you for having me here. It's great to be on the podcast and thank you for this extensive introduction. I actually never felt that there was any transition but it was a kind of evolution. Because even though I have a technical background and I was working as a front-end engineer overall I have 15 years of fronted engineer career, but it was always somehow focused on component-driven development.
Even before the term design systems emerged, of course, back then the understanding of the phenomena was maybe too technical. Modern standards and the evolution was maybe not have transitioned from front-end developer to designer or manager but adding these competencies on top of the existing ones.
Did your background help you to transition into design systems?
Yes, and no! So definitely knowing how to develop software, always helps, especially with different automation because a design system can be very much advanced. If you can code for yourself it helps a lot. You don't have to rely on different tools or paid tools.
Sometimes it is an obstacle because there is a certain gap between a software developer like thinking and design thinking. To my understanding designers see things in a more holistic way while the developers as you pointed out tend to modularize and componentize everything.
Even though a design system is focused on these chunks or pieces of interface it still has to be a very holistic theme for itself. So, in this regard, the software engineer background might be a little obsolete. This is why I believe it's very important to study design, to understand design as a shift to engineering, or at least to pair with your designer for that.
At which point does it make sense to start thinking about building a design system
… tune in to learn more 🎧
