Shipping a design system your whole team can use
Plenty of design systems are beautiful in Figma and irrelevant in the codebase within a quarter. The failure is almost never the design work. It's that the library and the product were never actually connected.
Drift is the default outcome
A Figma library and a component library are two descriptions of the same thing, maintained by different people under different deadlines. Without a mechanism holding them together, they separate — quietly, one urgent fix at a time, until nobody trusts either.
The mechanism that works is shared tokens. Colour, spacing, radius and type scale defined once, consumed by both. When they come from one source, the two can't disagree about what "accent" means.
Build the components people reach for
The instinct is to start with a full inventory — every button variant, every input state, every card. Most of it goes unused while the thing someone needs on Tuesday isn't there.
We start from the screens actually being built. Buttons, inputs, and whatever pattern the product repeats most. A system of eight components people use beats forty they work around.
Document decisions, not just usage
Most documentation says what a component does. The useful part is when to use it and what to use instead. "Secondary buttons pair with a primary; never put two primaries in one view" prevents more inconsistency than any prop table.
That's also what makes a system survive its authors. A team that knows why a rule exists can extend it. A team that only knows the rule will break it the first time it's inconvenient.
When not to build one
Below roughly a dozen screens, a design system is overhead. You'll spend longer maintaining the abstraction than you'd spend duplicating the markup, and you'll lock in patterns before you know whether they're right.
We say so when it applies. The point of a system is leverage, and leverage needs something to lift.
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