Design systems are a maintenance commitment

Teams ask us for a design system and often mean “a component library”. Those are different things, and confusing them is why so many systems quietly rot within a year.

A component library is a set of reusable parts. A design system is that library plus the decisions behind it, the documentation that explains them, and the people whose job it is to keep both current. Drop the third part and you get a folder of components that slowly drifts from what is in production.

Before starting one, we ask three questions: who owns it, how often does it get reviewed, and what happens when a product team needs something the system does not have? If those answers do not exist yet, the honest recommendation is usually to build fewer components and better documentation.