Every company I’ve worked at has attempted a design system. Every single one has struggled. The pattern is eerily consistent.

The Lifecycle of a Doomed Design System

Month 1-3: Excitement. A small team creates beautiful Figma files. Engineers build a component library. Everyone agrees this will “solve design debt forever.”

Month 6: Adoption stalls. Product teams keep building custom components because “the design system doesn’t have what we need.”

Month 12: The design system team is dissolved. The library enters maintenance mode. New hires don’t even know it exists.

Why This Happens

Design systems fail for one reason: they optimize for consistency over velocity.

Product teams don’t care about consistency. They care about shipping. When your button component requires three extra props and a wrapper div just to handle their specific use case, they’ll build their own button.

What Actually Works

1. Start with escape hatches

Every component should have a clean way to override default behavior. Not discouraged, not hidden—documented and supported.

// This should work, always
<Button variant="primary" className="my-custom-class">
  Ship it
</Button>

2. Optimize for the 80%

Don’t try to handle every edge case. Build components that cover common patterns beautifully. Accept that 20% of use cases will need custom solutions.

3. Embed, don’t enforce

Put a designer or engineer from the design system team directly into product teams. One quarter at a time. They learn what’s actually needed; product teams learn how to use the system.

The Meta Lesson

The best design systems I’ve seen are invisible. Teams use them because they’re genuinely faster than the alternative—not because someone wrote a policy saying they must.

Build for adoption. Consistency follows.