Design System Office Hours

Davy talks special co-host, Guy Segal, about his first month at his new design systems job at Atlassian, and the fun of being a newbie after the first 30 days, when the going really starts getting tough.

Davy and PJ talk about the role of our designers on the ground, we call them our ambassadors. These good eggs not only inform our day-to-day product improvements, but help keep up informed across the org.

Davy with friend of the program, Chela Giraldo talk about their recent experiences looking for a new design systems, and the struggles with developing the "design system portfolio" that can tell our unique stories.

Chela has a recent post about it, which you should check out on Design System Collective.

Davy and PJ discuss the challenges and strategies for design system training, especially when it comes to Figma. We explore the line between providing direct tool training and focusing on how the design system integrates with those tools.

Davy talks about what he's seen with the popularity around (local) product systems and how you can may want to adoption via providing just some design system team support. PJ ends the convo with the lighter weight approach of supporting templates in code and design.

Another takeaway from our cross-functional discussions, how do design system team members handle disagreements with consumers, or even our own teammates?

Davy and PJ talk dive into designers building helpers and plugins to support more specialized design system maintainer workflows, and the beauty of unblocking ourselves.

Davy and PJ talk about how to plan to best support inbound product design work, in addition to the differences between product-led work vs design system team-led initiatives.

Because it was PJ's first Config, we decided to record a live, IRL episode, recap our first thoughts about the new product releases and a thread that we started about who Figma is designing for, dating back from last year's event.

We're back with an episode an episode about component and design system flexibility. How opinionated should your design system be, vs a large set of reusable pieces that can be put in any which way together. Davy and PJ weigh in on both methods and where you may want to dive into a framework that allows you to build starting from anywhere.

Our friend Guy Segal, Director of Design Systems at Thomson Reuters comes and talks with us about consistency in operations and how to scale out systems thinking.

We learn about PJ's start in design systems, dating back to 2011, and Davy's first introduction to it in 2015. They discuss while tech has evolved, aspects such as theming still remain a struggle to figure out. Also discussed is how we evolved our roles, and what might be suitable traits and tactics used by design system people in 2025.

Davy and PJ talk about design and code parity, how we keep our artifacts aligned with live product, and other nuances to maintaining large scale component libraries.

Davy and PJ talk about the challenges of updating legacy components from yesteryear, and what it takes to migrate legacy code to new design system components. When is the suitable time to do this work?

Davy and PJ talk about the concepts presented in Brad Frost's 2013 book, Atomic Design, and how a simpler format in present day with components, patterns, and screens may be common representation for design teams.

In our second recent episode about reviewing work, Davy and PJ talk about how we review output from product designers on our teams and the need to stay plugged in so we can help designers earlier in the process.

While the podcast is one form of communication, on our teams we heavily utilize async written communication methods to best spread the good work of design systems. We talk about the different methods we communicate to stakeholders and consumers of our design system artifacts, specifically, documentation.

Davy and PJ dive into the various ways we've utilized crits on our teams to both do design ops related work, but also reviewing code, in addition to design.

Topical for the time of year, Davy gets PJ to spill some beans on how to best set up designers to best prove the value of their day-to-day work in design systems.

While we touched on teams of one, which is quite common in our community, how do we function in medium size teams of 3+ designers, and how can we effectively, and intentionally scale.

In our second episode dedicated to accessibility in design systems, Davy and PJ talk about the surface level explorations of color contrast, then learning more about how to better design for screen readers, for a better web experience.

We start our series with learning about how design systems interact and help our other team members from different disciplines. We start with Matt Petitt, Engineering Manager at Dayforce.

Davy and PJ talk in depth about the perils of chasing efficiency, and how we approach measuring effort and time-saved. And does this tie into velocity at all?

In the tough market of design team contractions, Davy and PJ talk about how to maintain focus and stability as a horizontal design practice.

On this episode, PJ talks about his time using Figma's REST API and how with so much data collected, we just need it to do a little more for us.

These have become some of our favorites, and tend to cover more ground than a typical ep. Nico, community manager for Zeplin joins as a co-host for this special ep.

Happy episode 60! Davy and PJ talk about a popular design system topic when we start out, Contributions and Federated Help. While this all sounds good, what are some of the pitfalls of relying too heavily on contributions and help from external design resources.

Is system adoption the only measure of success? Davy and PJ talk about adoption metrics we tend to tie ourselves to, and how it may not always paint the most complete picture.

Or aptly named, Color Complexity in Design by our GPT pal, Davy and PJ discuss the use or rather overuse of color in product design. When thinking about color in design systems, once again, less is most appropriate.

Fresh off 2 days of Config in-person conference, Davy talks with PJ about his time IRL, and talk about what they thought about feature releases, and what we might have expected.

Pre-Config episode, Davy and PJ follow up our last "Just Say No" episode with an ep about design system fatigue. As a service team, how do we maintain the good graces, and continue to help designers produce the best work. It all starts and ends with a design culture that promotes early communication with the your design system frens.

When you're on a team of one, or fully staffed team with design and engineers, you'll soon have to shift some of your yes responses, to no. Davy and PJ talk how this at times trickles in through contributions, something that was an exciting concept in early days, but can get harder to manage as demand scales.

Davy and PJ go over their favorite Davy and PJisms, their versions of design principles that they have been following them around through several design roles over the years. 

We had such good traction on one of our first episodes, we decided to bring on another friend of the program, Donnie D'Amato to talk about design technologists, where they should sit in the org, and how we can use them as designers to be our best helping hand.

It's a design system emergency! Our updates are no longer behind a somewhat blocking dialog in Figma. Davy and PJ had to jump on to talk about how this may help or not receive and adopt new system changes.

Davy and PJ talk about the importance of standing up rituals, much like our product design partners, including, how might design system teams handle crits and office hours. How might a designer working at a Facebook leverage a feed, or a internal Facebook group, to share updates.

We made it to our 2 year birthday and 50 episodes! We reflect in Davy's shift into back into IC at Meta, and PJ's shift from IC to Manager most recently at Pinterest, and how the roles differed for us in design systems.

Davy and PJ talk about how to get into your first DS job, the answer being things to know OTHER than building components. On the second half of the pod, we flip to how to get into DS as a discipline as a product designer.

As we approach 2 years, and 50 episodes, we recap this year and dive back into how AI changed some of our thinking this year, as well as what we would like to see out of the design systems practice in 2024.

Episode Transcripts

One theme that has been our mind working in large mega design teams, is how our product design teams handle outside, external POV, vs historical cannon. Davy and PJ discuss this, weaved in with how we like to evaluate potential solutions for our systems.

Episode Transcripts