Defining the governance process
Context
Building the design system went beyond components. It included patterns for navigation, loading pages, empty states, paywalls, and more. As features evolved, it became a long-term effort. Adoption was key, and maintaining momentum required discipline and alignment with product needs.
My approach
To balance structure and flexibility while keeping the system an enabler rather than a constraint, I introduced a governance process based on three pillars:
Weekly design system reviews
A centralized Slack hub for collaboration
Versioning for alignment and evolution
Outcome
This governance process provided structure while keeping the system adaptable, ensuring it grew in tandem with the product.
Weekly design system reviews
Every Friday, we held a one-hour session to review weekly updates and plan next steps. A shared to-do list helped track pending components. Depending on priorities, we either added new ones or reviewed designs with a focus on component usage.
Early on, we took a gradual approach to help my fellow designer learn how to build effective Figma components using variants, booleans, and instance swaps.
Google Calendar event for weekly design meeting
A centralized Slack hub for collaboration
Designers, developers, and PMs were invited to provide feedback and ask questions on a dedicated Slack channel. I made it a priority to respond quickly to keep engagement high. Over the first year, more than 200 messages were exchanged, showing the channel’s utility and strong adoption by the team.
The channel also served as a central hub. I set up a Slack canvas with links to the Figma design system file and a history of extracted tokens, ensuring developers had a single reference point.
Slack channel and canvas used to share design system resources
Versioning for alignment and evolution
Versioning helped track the design system’s evolution and ensured the development team stayed aligned with updates, not just for new components, but also for modifications adapting to product needs.
Unless a major update was needed, we published minor updates every two months as snapshots of the design system.
Each version was logged in Linear (our product development tool) under a dedicated project, which automatically assigned tasks to the mobile and web development teams’ backlogs.
Linear project tracking design system version updates