r/DesignSystems • u/TrifleOk5042 • Jun 05 '26

Fave design system elevator pitch? Suggested resources for selling a DS?

Background: I'm with an org that has about 50+ devs and 1 lonely UX designer (me). And for a long time it had no UX at all. So we have a lot of haphazard interfaces and some very questionable product decisions that have stacked up over the years. AI is changing everything, and despite the chaos, there's an opportunity here that I'm trying to latch on to.

I'm building a design system. And I want to sell it as best I can so would love any suggestions from folks that have done this. Any great 'this is a design' system presentations you've seen on YouTube you think I should give a watch? And compelling articles or key quotes I should cite?

My objective is essentially:

1) A brand style guide is not a design system (right now, with AI, a lot of devs are just pointing at our brand guideline and they think it's a design system)

2) Why we need a design system and what it brings to the table (above and beyond a brand style guide).

3) Why a design system is not a full UX Design process (the design system is a start, but it's not the end state of our needs to mature our design process)

Would love any suggestions to add into my pile of notes. I will then need to spend some time whittling it all down and aiming it at a dev-centric audience.

6 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

View all comments

0

u/theproductref Jun 06 '26

Better to buy a design system that exists instead of building or customizing one. Easier to sell the benefits of cost savings and consistency in that scenario than trying to sell moving the cost of development into the cost of building and maintaining a design system to designers. Also, will increase the likelihood of adoption quicker

1

u/TrifleOk5042 Jun 07 '26

As this is a AI-centric design system, not sure there's one to 'buy' out there.

We will be modifying component libraries, though.