How Not to Build a Design System: Lessons from the Trenches

Building a design system is often portrayed as a clean, linear process—but the reality is far messier. In this candid and practical talk, we’ll walk through the wrong turns, unexpected hurdles, and hard-earned lessons from our journey of creating a design system while simultaneously building the applications it was meant to support.

From struggling to get stakeholder buy-in, to the chaos of naming design tokens, to the challenge of aligning teams across design and engineering—we’ll share the missteps that slowed us down, the compromises we had to make, and what we’d do differently if we could start over.

This talk is for anyone who’s in the thick of building a design system (or thinking about starting one) and wants to learn from real-world experience—not just the polished case studies. Expect honest stories, practical takeaways, and a few laughs along the way. At the end of the talk, there’ll be time for questions and refreshments will be available.

Key Takeaways:

• Why timing and communication are everything when introducing a design system
• How naming things (especially tokens) can become a surprisingly big blocker
• The pitfalls of building the plane while flying it—developing the system and apps in parallel
• What finally helped us gain traction and alignment across teams