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Hmm, that's not true? GitHub, Atlassian, Microsoft, plenty of greatly and widely used design systems out there. The problem is different: they are huge invest

Hmm, that's not true? GitHub, Atlassian, Microsoft, plenty of greatly and widely used design systems out there. The problem is different: they are huge investments that most non-large companies cannot afford for economic and logistic reasons.

the_gipsy 4y ago
But those companies are several leagues higher than whatever Culture Amp is.
- joneil 4y ago
  I work at Culture Amp and was once team lead of the Design System team. Its not hard to justify the team. If 4 front end engineers in a design system team can solve some common problems (writing components, improving accessibility of existing components, writing docs, answering technical questions etc) in a way that makes 40 product facing front end engineers more effective than 44 who don't have access to the team... then the team is a net positive. At our scale we'd need to give a 10% improvement in efficiency to the product engineers. Both the engineers in product teams, and the various levels of leadership, have seen enough to believe we're making at least that much of a difference. Like almost any other company... measuring that accurately is a nightmare (and would require a significantly larger team just to measure ) but its a safe enough bet that we continue to invest in it.
  - the_gipsy 4y ago
    The problem, with something like a Design System and many other aspects of organizational management, is that efficiency measuring tends to ignore the overhead, the death by a 1000 papercuts, and only focuses on the sweet points.
brahbrah 4y ago
Just speaking it off my ass here, but it could be the scale of those companies that make those teams viable. Like let’s say you have some standardized systems that can cover the use cases of 20% of your teams. If you have 1000 teams vs 10 teams, covering 200 teams might make economic sense, but 2 teams wouldn’t

the_gipsy 4y ago

But those companies are several leagues higher than whatever Culture Amp is.

joneil 4y ago
I work at Culture Amp and was once team lead of the Design System team. Its not hard to justify the team. If 4 front end engineers in a design system team can solve some common problems (writing components, improving accessibility of existing components, writing docs, answering technical questions etc) in a way that makes 40 product facing front end engineers more effective than 44 who don't have access to the team... then the team is a net positive. At our scale we'd need to give a 10% improvement in efficiency to the product engineers. Both the engineers in product teams, and the various levels of leadership, have seen enough to believe we're making at least that much of a difference. Like almost any other company... measuring that accurately is a nightmare (and would require a significantly larger team just to measure ) but its a safe enough bet that we continue to invest in it.
- the_gipsy 4y ago
  The problem, with something like a Design System and many other aspects of organizational management, is that efficiency measuring tends to ignore the overhead, the death by a 1000 papercuts, and only focuses on the sweet points.

brahbrah 4y ago

Just speaking it off my ass here, but it could be the scale of those companies that make those teams viable. Like let’s say you have some standardized systems that can cover the use cases of 20% of your teams. If you have 1000 teams vs 10 teams, covering 200 teams might make economic sense, but 2 teams wouldn’t