Design system at Buzzvil

Design system vs startup. Takeaways. We built a Design system. It took us time, resources and a lot of energy, involving pretty much everyone in our design team. And its just the beginning of a long story. If you are working at a startup and are considering building a design system, you might find clues reading about our experience. First off, we cant ignore how time consuming building a system can be. Naturally some of the worries we had were to know if a design system was really worth it. And can a startup get any advantage from it? Long story short: Yes. A quick background Back when we decided to start building our system we were a 56 years old startup counting about 50+ members, including 3 product and 2 visual designers. The business was at that time aggressively expanding, our Business Development team got a few big partners that brought us to an all new level and our product team needed to react fast, scaling up our headcount, hiring lots of engineers to support our growing needs. In terms of design, we had 2 options, either hire a lot of designers to support in a linear way each integration or keep a core and highly efficient team to build up a system that could cover up all our needs in a centralized way. We went with option 2. To understand whats at stake, lets have a closer look at the problems we are trying to solve. We, at Buzzvil, are building a scalable platform for multiple partners in Korea, Japan and the US.