Two previous systems had been built and abandoned. Both were beautiful and both were built by designers, for designers, and shipped as a Figma library.
The third one started in code. We wrote the components first with two engineers, then documented them, then made the Figma library match — the opposite order, and the reason adoption went past 90% inside a year.
The lesson I took from it is that a design system is an engineering product with a design team as one of its users.
