Working in the corporate industry has taught me many things, one of the most challenging lessons to learn was how to deal with minimal support and resources. The unfortunate truth is that there are many underfunded or undersold projects; as a design system designer this has never felt more true.

I work in a small design system team (there are four people max, including myself) with an enterprise level design system to build. As there is no option to hire more people, the second best option was to take contribution from non-design system designers. On paper that sounds wonderful, we could have a sort of centralised-federated design system that people lovingly donate their time and components to. Except this was never going to be the reality; what seemed like a “free” resource to the organisation had issues elsewhere: