Design systems are a product

There’s often confusion about where design systems teams should live, and what, exactly, they are. Are they a tooling layer? Are they a set of shared styles? Are they part of ops? A process? A platform?

It’s understandable. Design systems overlap with platform, product, and process work, but what it really comes down to is this core truth: design systems are a product.

They have users, require a roadmap, and accumulate technical debt. They need to be maintained, measured, and evolved like any other product in your ecosystem. And the more clearly you treat them that way, the more effective, and adopted, they become.

So let’s unpack why that distinction matters, where the boundaries are, and how to structure your teams so design systems can thrive without getting lost in the operational shuffle or getting stuck in limbo between disciplines.

Why the structural missteps?

Some teams treat design systems like a subset of Design Ops. Others see them as a static design-only toolkit maintained off to the side. Meanwhile, engineers might have a platform team doing something similar in parallel, but disconnected.

That’s when things fall apart.

When you silo design in one area and engineering in another, you don’t get a design system. You get a pile of components with no real adoption, no shared ownership, and no real product strategy behind it.

A design system is not a process or a toolkit. And it’s definitely not something one discipline can own in isolation.

A design system needs to be built and maintained by a cross-functional team of designers and engineers working together, with shared goals, workflows, and accountabilities.

That’s what makes it scalable, usable, and sustainable.

Design systems vs design ops

Design systems and design ops both exist to bring scale and consistency to design. But they serve fundamentally different purposes, and require different skillsets and contexts.

Here’s how they break down:

Design Ops

• Workflow governance

• Design rituals and process

• Onboarding and enablement

• Hiring frameworks and resource planning

• Team health and operating models

• Tooling and budgeting

Design systems

• Component libraries

• Token infrastructure

• Documentation

• Theme architecture

• UI frameworks

• Accessibility, localization, taxonomy

• Brand guidance (typography, colors, data vis, illustrations, icons, motion, etc)

• Contribution models and ambassador frameworks

The key distinction:

Design Ops is about how product design work happens.
Design Systems are product work.

Design systems just happen to serve internal users instead of external (at least until you start supporting third parties, but that’s a topic for a different day).

The risk of getting it wrong

When design systems are siloed, under-resourced, or treated like a side project, the whole org pays the price:

Engineering and design drift apart. Without shared ownership and a unified roadmap, priorities compete. Engineering builds their own components. Design iterates in isolation. The system stops being a system.

It becomes design-only and loses dev credibility. If engineers don’t see themselves in the system, they stop using it. That leads to inconsistencies, forked libraries, and duplication.

The design system teams get stuck firefighting, not evolving the system. Without proper staffing and support, the designers and engineers can’t keep up with ongoing product requests, much less invest in strategic improvements.

The system stagnates. Vision gets lost. No one tracks adoption or performance. And no one’s accountable for making the system better over time.

It becomes a bottleneck—or worse, irrelevant. Product teams bypass the system entirely. Velocity slows, silos grow taller, and everything takes longer to ship.

Consistency and accessibility fall apart. With no central team enforcing standards or providing guardrails, UX quality degrades. WCAG compliance becomes optional. And customer experience suffers.

So what should you do instead?

Treat your design system as a product

When you shift your mindset from “design system as toolkit” to “design system as product,” everything changes:

• Vision and strategy - Where is the design system going, why, how

• Roadmaps - Driven by real usage data and cross-functional needs

• Backlog management - Prioritized like any product: tech scope, value, and effort

• Versioning - Because updates can break things.

• QA and release cycles - Test, document, repeat.

• Metrics - Adoption, coverage, satisfaction, reusability, onboarding

• Team alignment - Designers and engineering working side-by-side

• Support and intake - Feedback loops, changelogs, collaboration

The real test of a design system isn’t how it looks or functions in isolation. It’s how well it integrates into real product work.

Where should the design system group sit?

Here’s how to set it up for success:

• It should be a dedicated product team with both designers and engineers working side-by-side—not parallel functions reporting into separate silos.

• It should report to a single accountable leader, ideally at the director level and where this is their primary focus, not a part-time initiative. And it should be someone with strong design systems fluency and cross-functional influence. In my experience, design leaders tend to understand the system’s strategic role more holistically than engineering leads who often view it solely as infrastructure. Beneath this single leader sit both design and engineering managers or leads, and their respective teams.

• It should partner with Ops, not report into it. Design Ops supports adoption, onboarding, governance, and communication. They’re essential partners and critical to system success, but they’re not responsible for building or maintaining the system itself.

What about AI and design systems?

As AI design becomes embedded in the design workflow, the design system starts to expand:

• Prompt templates

• Smart components

• AI-assisted scaffolding for flows or UIs

• Tokens for behavior, not just appearance

This is where AI Ops comes in—helping standardize, test, and govern how AI fits into your system workflows. And again, it’s a partnership: the system evolves in tandem with tooling and workflow changes. And Ops helps coordinate the change management, and support governance and adoption needed to scale.

The TL;DR

Design systems aren’t operational overhead. They’re not a side hustle with a visual designer and a dev cranking out half-baked components in a dark corner. They’re not just a design initiative. They are internal products that require dedicated, cross-functional teams and product-level rigor.

They power every other product you ship, so treat them accordingly. Give your design system a roadmap. Give it a team. And give it the Ops support it needs to scale and stick.