The 2 important sides 🪙 for a Design System Team.
- The Assets, in code, design, guidelines, compliance standards etc.
- The Community, in developers, designers and products folks using the system.
The Assets
Every Enterprise Design System is different in their own way. Their evolution, charter and assets vary based on many factors including but not limited to.
- Technology stack direction in their Enterprise
- Technical knowledge and comfort of the developers
- Existing support for certain frameworks
- Demand for certain platforms and frameworks
At Visa, our roots and demand were for the Angular framework. So, we built the HTML/CSS UI component library and then the Angular component library after that. The following year the demand for React started small and grew steady. In the native mobile space, we saw teams challenged and building technical debt on maintaining separate code bases between iOS and Android. So, seeing this opportunity and the growth of Flutter, we invested in building native mobile UI widget library in Flutter.
We have evolved over 3 generations of design systems. Sunsetting older generations and versions from support has been on a candence as well.
The Community
The assets will never be used if there is no community of developers and designers using them.
We have built our Community from scratch since 2017. Relationships were built one developer at a time. There were many challenges from outside teams, working through varying opinions etc. We established a weekly office hours culture since 2019. We logged the support and questions, helped the community tactically. Also, strategized and took actions on the data from the office hours quants.
Today we have 1400+ members on our Teams group, majority being developers. 6000+ unique individuals come to our web properties across Home, React, Angular, Flutter and CSS. We serve weekly with 3 office hours across North America, Asia Pacific and European Union regions.
Our focus is to serve the community, enabling them to be bold in their product ideas and design, empowering them to move fast in product development, so they can ship, sell and make revenue. Raising the tide at Visa means a lot to us.
Tending to both these sides 👩🏽🌾, with at most care, is paramount to long-term success in value, impact and service.