What’s a Design Systems Lead
A Design Systems Lead role includes driving the vision, strategy, roadmap, build and implementation of a design system. This person has a systems-mindset to build and integrate consistent, efficient components across the product portfolio with emphasis on the complete systems life-cycle, from establishing a practice and vision that endures to design, build, document, and maintain a library used by many product teams.
A Design System Lead has also experience contributing to lower-level decision making, direct broader strategy, and observing when narrower efforts conflict with or distract from broader goals.
Responsibilities of this role include:
- Lead the design and implementation of a design system.
- Identify, prioritize, and monitor tasks, progress of design, development, and documentation across team members.
- Maintain and improve the contribution model to streamline the process of multiple autonomous product teams contributing to the design system.
- Present the system’s mission, library, and process to other groups, including product managers, designers and developers throughout the company.
- Report team and system progress regularly to key stakeholders and the rest of the organization.
- Provide leadership and guidance to teams around using shared patterns, and identify opportunities to create new patterns and components within their workstreams.
- Conduct regular one-on-one reviews with team members to identify successes, challenges, perspectives and preferences.
- Mentoring and building others.
- Help maintain a culture of empathy, safety and belonging where all voices are heard.
