The Design Systems Playbook
You are probably maintaining a system nobody outside design actually uses. The Figma library is polished. Engineering built their own component library eighteen months ago and never looked back — and now the documentation is out of date, nobody owns contribution decisions, and the whole thing is one budget review away from being quietly disbanded.
This playbook gives you the operational framework for building a design system that survives past launch — one with clear governance, a contribution model that scales, and a health metric you can defend in a budget conversation. The outcome is a system embedded in engineering's actual workflow, not just admired in design crits.
What's inside:
The System Health Matrix — signature framework that measures adoption, coverage, velocity, and debt against what "healthy" actually looks like
The Contribution Tier System (Core, Lab, Candidates) — fix the flat contribution model before the review queue becomes the biggest blocker to adoption
The Strangler Pattern — the only politically viable way to migrate off a legacy system without a rebuild nobody will approve
Governance Models — choose between Centralised, Federated, and Consortium before politics chooses for you
The Engineering Waste Calculator — an Appendix A tool that turns component reinvention into a number Finance will actually act on
A design system that cannot be defended in a budget meeting is a design system on borrowed time. This playbook covers both the craft and the politics.
Format: PDF, A4, approx. 16 pages
The Design Systems Playbook
You are probably maintaining a system nobody outside design actually uses. The Figma library is polished. Engineering built their own component library eighteen months ago and never looked back — and now the documentation is out of date, nobody owns contribution decisions, and the whole thing is one budget review away from being quietly disbanded.
This playbook gives you the operational framework for building a design system that survives past launch — one with clear governance, a contribution model that scales, and a health metric you can defend in a budget conversation. The outcome is a system embedded in engineering's actual workflow, not just admired in design crits.
What's inside:
The System Health Matrix — signature framework that measures adoption, coverage, velocity, and debt against what "healthy" actually looks like
The Contribution Tier System (Core, Lab, Candidates) — fix the flat contribution model before the review queue becomes the biggest blocker to adoption
The Strangler Pattern — the only politically viable way to migrate off a legacy system without a rebuild nobody will approve
Governance Models — choose between Centralised, Federated, and Consortium before politics chooses for you
The Engineering Waste Calculator — an Appendix A tool that turns component reinvention into a number Finance will actually act on
A design system that cannot be defended in a budget meeting is a design system on borrowed time. This playbook covers both the craft and the politics.
Format: PDF, A4, approx. 16 pages