A design system is not a Figma library. It is a shared contract between design and engineering, and like any contract it fails the moment one side stops finding it useful.
Start with the ugly components
Everyone wants to design the button first. Buttons are easy. Start with the date picker, the data table and the multi-select — the components teams currently rebuild badly, every sprint.
Version it like software
Semantic versioning, a changelog and a deprecation policy. If a consuming team cannot tell whether upgrading will break them, they will simply never upgrade.
Measure adoption, not output
Count the percentage of screens built from system components. That single number tells you more than any inventory of how many components you have shipped.
