As tech companies grow, the creation of their design system can become a powerful and necessary tool. Typically consisting of a defined set of reusable components and guidelines, design systems make it easy for anyone to create a brand-aligned and cohesive customer experience consistently. At their best, they have the power to align everyone on a shared vision of what your brand’s voice and visual style is, and how it behaves. If you’re new to the world of design systems, I’d recommend reading InVision’s Design Systems Handbook.

Over the years, Etsy’s design system went through many incarnations. The way we organized to do the work also changed, and in 2016 we created our first dedicated Design Systems team. Up until then, it had been built and maintained by a group of designers and engineers who did it on top of their regular product work. Improvements were being made, but slowly. As demand increased, it became clear we needed a full-time team to keep pace.

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. Anyone could still contribute to the work, but the heavy lifting was now the responsibility of the Design Systems team.

The reality turned out to be more complicated than that.

Although we now had a dedicated team, we were still relatively small with a ton of surface area to cover; Etsy had customer experiences spanning web, iOS, Android, email, and off-Etsy and offline, which needed to meet the needs of both buyers and sellers who had very different needs. We were also working on the creation of a new marketplace with its own brand and customer needs. We were stretched thin and weren’t able to support all the requests for new or modified components. Product teams would fill in the gaps themselves by creating the additions or modifications they needed, but often without the due diligence required to make sure they would work across all our use cases and relevant platforms. The Design Systems team fell into a pattern of playing catch-up. We were heading down a road where we were a bottleneck, and the benefit of our systems being the source of truth was slowly deteriorating.

Fostering collective ownership

We realized that ultimately for our systems to succeed long-term, they needed to be thought of as everyone’s responsibility. It became clear our role as a team wasn’t just doing the heavy lifting of ongoing maintenance and improvements. We were a team of system advocates and facilitators, helping everyone contribute to our evolving system with the big picture in mind.

We learned it was important to create the space, time, and variety of ways people could be involved. We needed to define clear goals for how to contribute, and what a successful contribution was. Lastly, there had to be opportunities for cross exposure to both the demands and constraints of individual product teams and the Design Systems team.

Over the course of that first year, we experimented with and tried a lot of different things. Some were spun up, but most evolved from existing programs. We ended up with an ecosystem of opportunities, processes, and mechanisms that were valuable in different ways.

Design Bug Rotation

Etsy had accumulated a decent amount of design debt over the years. As you navigated across Etsy, you could encounter a variety of similar but slightly different components, interactions, or behaviors. It created a fragmented and confusing customer experience, eroding customer trust.

Inspired by the engineering organization, the Design team created the Design Bug Rotation to help pay down our design debt. Every two weeks or so, a group of designers would get together for a couple of hours to fix what we called “design bugs.” These were things that didn’t hinder functionality and wouldn’t have been filed as an engineering bug, but were places where we were using an old component, an existing one incorrectly, or a one-off alteration. As anyone in the company encountered one of these bugs, they’d file a ticket under a shared Jira board. During a rotation, designers would go through the list and chip away at them.