the easy part of a design system is the figma library, obviously. the hard part is everything after that. getting a team thats mid sprint to adopt a component they didnt even choose, migrating screens that are already making money, keeping the thing from going stale the second someone declares it "done" (nothing is ever done btw)
the rollouts that actually stuck all had one thing in common, they solved a real immediate problem for the team BEFORE asking for anything back. we shipped a shared date picker that fixed a known accessibility bug and it got adopted in like a week, no questions asked. meanwhile a beautifully documented button variant nobody asked for just sat there untouched for a whole quarter 💀
governance matters more than how pretty the components are once your team gets past a certain size. if theres no easy lightweight way to propose changes, exceptions just pile up quietly until the system and the actual product have drifted apart and nobody notices til a redesign forces the conversation
the metric worth actually tracking isnt component count, its the gap between "components that exist" and "components people are actually using in prod". that gap IS the real backlog, not the roadmap doc lol
