Design Systems at Scale: A Practical Guide

Most design system initiatives start with genuine intent: create consistency, accelerate design, reduce duplication, establish shared language. But somewhere between launch and scale, things get complicated. Teams that championed the system stop using it. Components sit unmaintained. The system becomes a bottleneck instead of a catalyst.

The problem isn't technical. It's strategic. Design leaders often treat systems as a design problem, when at scale, they're actually an organizational problem.

Why Design Systems Fail at Scale

Let me start with what doesn't work: building a comprehensive system first, then rolling it out to teams. This top-down approach assumes:

• •- Everyone understands the system the same way
• •All teams have the same needs
• •The system will be adopted because it's objectively better
• •Components are static things that can be designed once

All three assumptions are wrong.

At scale, your organization has multiple product verticals, teams with different maturity levels, and competing priorities. A monolithic system ignores these realities. It becomes an impediment—a checklist teams work around instead of a tool they depend on.

The graveyard of failed systems is full of beautifully designed components nobody uses.

The Real Work: Organizational Design

Building a system that scales requires thinking beyond components. It requires thinking about:

Governance and Ownership: Who decides when a component is "done"? Who owns each component? What happens when two teams need the same thing but envision it differently?

Contribution Models: How do teams add their own components? What's the review process? How do you prevent the system from becoming a dumping ground for every one-off variation?

Evolution and Versioning: Components change over time. How do you update them without breaking products already using older versions? How do you communicate changes?

Adoption Incentives: What makes teams actually use the system instead of building their own solutions? Is it mandated, or do they choose it because it's genuinely better?

These are leadership questions, not design questions. Yet most design leaders focus on the components while ignoring the infrastructure that determines whether those components actually get used.

The Relay Approach: Growth Over Perfection

At NFI, we approached design systems strategically by accepting a fundamental principle: the system grows as the organization grows. It's not something you build once and maintain. It's something you architect to evolve.

When we started, we didn't try to build a comprehensive system. We identified core patterns—buttons, inputs, cards, navigation—and iterated on those. This served two purposes:

First, it gave teams immediate value. They could use the system *now*, not after we'd designed for every possible use case.

Second, it established the rhythm of how the system would work: ship early, gather feedback, evolve. This became the cultural expectation.

Strategic Decisions That Scaled

Decentralized Contributions with Centralized Review: Teams could propose components, but everything went through a review process that ensured consistency and prevented redundancy. This made teams feel ownership while maintaining coherence. It's slower than pure top-down, but it's also more likely to get adopted because teams have a say.

Clear Component Maturity Levels: We didn't have "done" and "not done." We had experimental, stable, and legacy. This clarity helped teams understand what they were adopting and manage their own risk. A team could use an experimental component knowing it might change, making the barrier to trying new things lower.

Documentation That Served Multiple Audiences: The same component needed different documentation for designers (how to use it, when to use it, when *not* to use it) versus developers (API, props, code examples, edge cases). We invested in documentation layers rather than trying to write one document for everyone.

Versioning as Communication: Every major version bump was an opportunity to communicate *why* we made a change. Not just "we updated the button," but "we updated the button because user research showed this interaction pattern was more intuitive." This context transformed versioning from a technical necessity into a teaching tool.

The Scaling Challenge: When One System Isn't Enough

Here's where strategic thinking becomes critical: at a certain scale, one monolithic system often isn't the answer anymore.

As an organization grows, you might end up with:

• •- Multiple product lines with different aesthetic or interaction requirements
• •Different technical stacks (we can't have one system if half the organization uses React and the other half uses Vue)
• •Maturity mismatches where some teams are advanced enough to need custom solutions while others still benefit from guardrails

Instead of forcing everything into one system, successful organizations adopt a systems of systems approach. You have a core system (foundational patterns, typography, color, spacing) and then specialized systems for different contexts.

This is hard for design leaders to accept because it feels like a failure. It's not. It's maturity. It's recognizing that one size doesn't fit all, and that's okay.

At NFI, we maintained a core component library that everyone used, but we also enabled specialized teams to build their own extensions for their specific contexts. This required trust and clear governance, but it prevented the system from becoming a bottleneck.

The Hidden Work: Maintenance and Evolution

Here's what nobody tells you about design systems at scale: most of the work isn't building them. It's maintaining them.

A component that worked great six months ago might not work so well now because:

• •- New accessibility requirements emerged
• •Browser support changed
• •Usage patterns revealed edge cases nobody anticipated
• •The design language evolved
• •Component dependencies need updating

At scale, someone needs to own this ongoing work. Not as a side project. As a primary responsibility.

This is where many systems fail. Teams launch the system, celebrate the milestone, declare victory, then wonder why adoption flatlines. It's because nobody's actively maintaining and evangelizing the system. It becomes stale, outdated, and teams stop trusting it.

Successful systems at scale have a dedicated team (or at minimum, allocated time) for:

• •- Reviewing and accepting community contributions
• •Updating components based on new requirements
• •Testing across browsers and devices
• •Communicating changes and updates
• •Helping teams migrate to new versions

This is operational overhead that needs to be budgeted. If you can't commit to it, you can't scale a system.

Communication: The Secret Sauce

Here's something most design systems documentation misses: the system lives in conversations as much as in components.

At scale, you need:

Regular Sync Points: Monthly or quarterly reviews where teams discuss their challenges, propose new components, and debate decisions. This prevents the system from becoming a top-down mandate and makes teams feel heard.

Public Decisions: When you make a decision about the system, document it. Not just the decision itself, but the reasoning. Why did we choose this interaction pattern over that one? What trade-offs did we make? This context is invaluable as the system evolves.

Feedback Loops: Make it easy for teams to report bugs, request features, or propose changes. The system should evolve based on real usage, not just planned updates.

Evangelism: Someone needs to tell the story of the system. Not the technical story—the impact story. How much faster are teams shipping? Where have we reduced rework? What patterns are emerging that could become standard? This keeps the system visible and valuable.

The Strategic Framework

If you're building a design system that needs to scale, think about these questions:

Governance: Who owns the system? Who can contribute? What's the process for adding new components? How do you prevent it from becoming bloated?

Evolution: How will the system change over time? What's your versioning strategy? How do you communicate changes?

Adoption: What makes teams use this system versus building their own? Is it mandated or voluntary? How do you incentivize adoption?

Maintenance: Who's responsible for keeping the system current? What's the operational overhead?

Communication: How do you keep the system visible? How do you tell the impact story?

Scope: Is one system the right answer, or do you need multiple systems? How do they relate to each other?

These aren't design questions. They're organizational design questions. Get them right, and your design system scales. Get them wrong, and you end up with a beautiful set of components that nobody uses.

The Goal: Systems That Serve Organizations

The best design systems aren't the most beautiful ones. They're the ones that actually get used because they genuinely make work easier. They're maintained consistently. They evolve with the organization. Teams adopt them not because they're mandated, but because they're genuinely better.

Building that requires thinking strategically about governance, maintenance, communication, and organizational structure—not just about components.

If you're a design leader planning a system, start with the organizational questions. The component design will follow naturally once you understand how the system needs to work within your organization's structure.

Your design system isn't a design asset. It's an organizational asset. Treat it that way.