Design System Office Hours

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.

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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.

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With convos of relying on external services such as design system docs sites, Figma plugins, or analytics, we talk about our experience working in large teams with funding to build our own, vs utilizing third party services that can simply get you up and running immediately.

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Davy and PJ talk a little more in depth about support and the dangers of being a purely reactive design system team. How do you handle requests, and how to operate the program during times of duress.

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Listener question: DS team of one, and how to keep afloat and keep the program going. We touch on what you might want to focus on, and getting help as soon as you can so you can scale.

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We are back in your lives with a normal 1:1 with Davy and PJ about design system complexities, and how you might want to consider a system with less tokens, variants, and what it's like for Davy to manage 149 components on web alone.

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We have a friend of the program, Cintia Romero from Pinterest to talk about her work leading the accessibility design and education programs that has been now consumed by hundreds of designers.

You can view the Pinterest docs site at:https://gestalt.pinterest.systems/

Recorded with @disco_lu a few months ago, Davy and Luis go rapid-fire on various design system hiring, component-building philosophies, and training. See below for timestamps.

(1:25): How Davy got started in DS

(6:00): Package my narrative as DS designer

(7:00): How to posture yourself to obtain your ideal position

(8:34): How to utilize existing job postings internally mentioning DS to get into your ideal position

(11:43): Davy’s way to cope with current layoffs

(13:05): Shift to more community in DS in the last few years

(14:05): How do we open the door for greater collaboration vs governance

(15:34): Merging with another team, how do we navigate

(17:04): How do you deal with change and keep working moving along

(18:16): How do you operationalize the merging of teams, files, ceremonies

(20:44): Where does design ops and product management intersect

(21:55): How do we deprioritize the pixels and prioritize planning

(26:10): Refactoring to infinity when not tied to a specific timeline

(29:05): Clear business objective around brand updates

(29:45): Sometimes even with apps like gmail, it takes a while to roll out updates

(30:44): Uber components that can do anything, is this the right method for most

(32:44): Design and engineering parity

(35:54): Separating components to be distinct use cases so you can see what you’re getting.

(36:55): Thinking tactically like an engineer

(37:40): File Hygiene

(38:28): Training and education and how to use your system as intended

(40:15): Watching people is the best way to learn

(41:22): Regular open office hours for any role

(41:51): Telling people what you’re working on and what’s coming

(43:12): Writing posts to talk about your work

(44:40): Collecting resources and learning together

(45:38): Doing a demo and going first to show best practice. Lead the way.

(47:23): Working an understanding how a specific component use case, doing a live design session.

(48:23): Systemizing training vs having 1:1s.

(49:00): Whether you need a design system

Happy 40th episode birthday. We talk about moving fast vs designing and building with intentionality, and naturally the convo led morphed into a half episode about ways of partnering with product designers, and how we work on our systems at Meta and Pinterest.

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With DS being table stakes on lots of product design teams, and even job postings, we talk about whether you need one, or whether your efforts should be scaled elsewhere. What are you really getting yourself into when you start this journey..

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This was a special LIVE RECORDING at The Future of Design Systems conference hosted by @IntoDSConf. Friend of the program @rominadesigner takes over as host. We talk about what hard skills are important to have (building components), and the novel idea of interviewing specifically for systems thinking.

Davy comes back from Config 2023, pondering life in and outside of the file, and some rapid fire QA with Davy and PJ. (01:25) Config 2023 IRL recap. (22:10) IntoDS, Future of Design Systems talk QA.

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Bonus link: Leading through Uncertainty @halli

One of Davy's favorite parts of being an IC is being able to still build components, and chase Figma's quest for excellence. Davy and PJ talk about the approach their teams take for building and maintaining design components, alignment with code source of truth, and staying away from uber components.

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We’ve been following Masato’s project, designsystem.careers for a while now, and given the nature of the design job economy, wanted to pick his brain on how we can better interview design system designers and engineers.

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As design system maintainers, we have the unique role of being deeply entrenched in our own product roadmaps. How can we find opportunity areas and advocate for what we think is best for our consumers? Can we even achieve this within a given time frame. Davy PM and PJ talk about how this has worked at Meta and Pinterest.

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Governance doesn't have to be a bad work, but can define how you convey intent through your system. We love governing so much, there's some bits and pieces that we covered in Ep 15: Support.

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Special episode with a friend of the program, Angelina Allen, Senior Product Manager of Native Design Systems at US Bank. Infinitely curious without having product management dedicated support on our teams, Davy and PJ talk to her about her role and how important it is on larger design systems team to have a product manager/owner help guide the work through and be impartial to designer or engineer decisions.

What happens when we get lost on our own sauce, our presentations, decks, vision work, and forget about the tactical and operational work we need to do so we can keep the design systems train moving along.

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We made it to episode 30! It's about time we talked about Design Delivery and why design system maintainers are so passionate about it. Can we as a design and product team agree to deliver artifacts, in one single format? I bet the design systems team can help with a framework for that.

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Looking to learn more about design systems with some friends of the program, we talk to Val Poon, an early career designer at Info-Tech Research Group.

With all this chat (pun included) about ChatGPT, how else can we utilize some programmable help with AI and automation. Plus, the differences between a sweet potato and a yam. 

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Davy and PJ answer listener questions that came in from some friends of the program. We touch on fun component library design only components, governance, office hours issue tracking, documentation, interviewing, and much more.

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With the rise of design system teams in orgs, Davy and PJ talk about how their roles have progressed through product design, and design ops. How have things changed while we have come in and out of IC <> management? Today in our roles, what does IC leadership in Design Systems look like for us?

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Happy 2023 and 1st birthday to the podcast! We got a treat for those new the program, our greatest hits from the first 20 episodes. Timestamps: Ep 9: ROI (02:08), Ep 10: Hindsight (07:00), Ep 13: Feedback (11:42), Ep 18: Contributions (15:38), Ep 20: Education and Onboarding (19:59), Ep 2: Design Technologists (25:00), Ep 3: Releases (28:33), Ep 5: Figma is NOT a DS (30:54), Ep 6: Mandates (38:55), Ep 7: JIRA MORMONT (43:33).

Welcome to the show 2023, even tho this was recorded in 2022. This is the last of our trilogy series, about how to get started in Design Systems. What happens after you get to year 2 and so on? Is your job done because everyone is bought in and good actors and advocates supporting the system?

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2nd in our series of the first years of design systems, Davy and PJ talk about how to grow the team, and where we have decided on our teams to focus on; which of the design system knobs, library, education, documentation, we decided to turn.

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Originally episode 21, if not for our last special episode on layoffs, we talk about how to get a design system up and running, and things we looked to achieve in years 0-1. This ep is the first in a series of 3 episodes about getting started in design systems.

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During this rough week at Meta and Twitter, Davy and PJ discuss how to continuously prove ROI for yourself and your team in the light of operating on leaner teams. 

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Happy Halloween and 20th episode to us! Davy and PJ talk about how their teams support educating designers and the continuous task of training product designers, whether they are new to the org, or just new to the design system.

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Davy and PJ talk about different design system team make ups at Disney Streaming, Meta, and Pinterest. How federated vs centralized have worked for them; and how big does your team need to be?

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Davy and PJ talk about how they're thinking about contribution models on their teams and mechanisms to get better XFN collaboration between design and engineering.

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Davy and PJ react to the earth-shattering news that Adobe is “teaming up" with Figma, and what that may or may not mean to us.

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Davy and PJ discuss issues with copy cat design patterns and frameworks. What might work for your company may not work for the next. Design systems is not one size fits all, but fits most.

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Davy talks with PJ about various ways of automating design system and design ops tasks to help our day-to-day lives as worker-bees easier.

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Davy and PJ talk about their methods of design systems support, ranging from Davy's fave, Office Hours, to async support on Slack. A good episode candidate to do design systems bingo/drinking game. 

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PJ grills Davy about his super organized and sometimes outrageous file hygiene mandates he lead while working at Disney Streaming. How can you use organization and naming to drive better alignment across design and engineering partners?

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Davy and PJ talk about how we've incorporated design and engineering user feedback on our design system work. Leaning into surveys, PJ has had great success half-over-half by employing a new product framework.. listening. 

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Davy talks about speaking at his first design conference last month, UXDX. We talk about how to find your voice and how to get started for those whom want to engage more with the product design community.

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We took a long Memorial Day vacay and back to talk about adoption methods and get how to get designers excited to use your design system. Chatter about how different strategies apply for differing scale of teams. 

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Happy 10th episode birthday! We wanted to take a look at and see, knowing what we've known about working on design systems at our companies, what we wish we would have known had we started today.

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We're almost at episode 10, and we're here to talk about ROI, driving impact. It has to do with learning what leadership's LOVE LANGUAGE is.

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We talk about a fun topic of scale, how to support multiple brands under 1 design system. Davy talks a bit about considerations when designing across Disney+ and Star+ and the usage of theming to design for one system in whole.

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We've polled our listeners and heard that JIRA was their favorite design tool, over Figma. So we decided to talk about how we've utilized JIRA as Design System product owners and how it's impacted the way we plan our work.

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Mandates, governance, we discuss how our orgs approach the mandates for usage of the Design Systems.

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Is your work in Figma a Design System? We chat about how design artifacts and tools are just one portion of what a system represents.

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One of the favorite talking points of all Design System folx, Documentation. What does documentation mean to you?

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An meta-pilot on releasing the podcast on a Wednesday vs a Friday. We talk about how we manage Design System releases as well as the differences between versioning and version control. 

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Welcome to our second episode! We have Ayesha Mazrana (@AyeshaKMaz) a Design Technologist at Pinterest, talking about her role, how she works with design and engineering, and how she's found success working on a Design Systems team with PJ.

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Welcome to our first episode. Davy and PJ talk about who they are, and dive into their roles as Design Managers, managing Design Systems for 2 different organizations.

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Design System Office Hours trailer. No spoilers!