The People Part of Design Systems - Related Works - Medium

We had a grand vision that by enabling a team of designers, engineers, and product managers to focus on the continued maintenance, improvement, and adoption of our system, the rest of the product org could go back to concentrating on building customer experiences.

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The reality turned out to be more complicated than that.

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Inspired by the engineering organization, the Design team created the Design Bug Rotation to help pay down our design debt.

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Over the years, the rotation gained more structure, with each rotation focused on a specific theme, component, or product area

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Beyond speeding up our work, rotations often freed up the Systems team to innovate and think at a higher level.

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Once we created the Design Systems team, we’d try to have as many new hires as possible do their boot camp with us. We’d give them an achievable project they could finish within two weeks that provided an opportunity for them to get some hands-on experience using our toolkits, documentation and other resources.

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For every year at Etsy, any brand designer, product designer or engineer could spend two consecutive weeks embedded in the Design Systems team.

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Rotations with our brand partners provided insight into how to make our systems a stronger expression of our brand, while also making their work more systems-minded in its execution and operations.

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Posted on August 21, 2019