Design systems are easy to praise in slides. They are hard when marketing needs a new surface every sprint and engineers still owe stability.
The useful systems I have worked on share a few traits:
- Tokens and components are contracts — versioning and communication matter as much as the code.
- Migration is a product problem — incremental paths beat “big bang” rewrites.
- Accessibility and consistency are measurable — otherwise they become opinions in review.
If you are a founder hiring for this work, ask candidates how they shipped during a rebrand or major visual pivot — not only how they would architect a greenfield library.