Why our design system stalled after six months

Introduction

A postmortem on documentation nobody read, missing ownership, and the two process changes that finally got teams using the library.

The uncomfortable middle

Most advice here is written for the extremes: brand-new teams and enormous organizations. Real teams live in the middle, where the pragmatic answer is rarely the textbook one.

Notes from the middle

• Process is what makes a bad day survivable, not what makes a good day efficient.
• The person who writes the summary owns the decision — so rotate it.
• “We should” statements rot; dated commitments don’t.

Questions worth asking

1. What would we do if we had half the time?
2. Which part of this would we defend in an incident review?
3. What are we pretending not to know?

Closing

Disagree, commit, and put the date on it. Then move on to the actual work.