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The Internal Pitch

EP10 — Getting your design system onto the engineering roadmap as a priority — not as a favor — requires a different argument than the one most DS teams make.

Internal Customers

EP09 — The easy answer is "everyone." That sounds inclusive. It is also useless. Here's how to segment your actual users before your adoption rate does it for you.

The ROI Engine

EP08 — "Teams seem happier" has never once defended a design system budget. Here's how to measure the value of a design system in language that survives a leadership meeting.

The Living Roadmap

EP07 — A design system without a roadmap is a project with a Figma file. Here's how to build the planning artifact that keeps the system alive when delivery pressure hits.

The Single Source of Truth: Design to Code

SE01EP06 — If a value changes in your design file, how long before it's live in production? If you can't answer in seconds — you don't have a single source of truth.

Token Drift: The Silent System Killer

SE01EP05 — Tokens don't create consistency. They expose whether your assumptions were consistent to begin with. A personal story about building tokens for a medium I had never designed for.

The Pilot Phase

SE01EP04 — One component in production beats two hundred in Figma. Here's how to find the right one.

The Charter Document

EP03 — Every design system launch meeting ends with full alignment. Three months later, nobody agrees on anything. The charter is the document that prevents that gap.

The Architecture of Zero

EP02 — Most design system teams start at the wrong layer. Six months later: two hundred components, three percent adoption. The sequence was wrong from the start.

Your Design System Is Not a Project. That's the Problem.

EP01 — Most design systems don't fail because of bad components. They fail because of one thinking error. Here's what it is.