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If your design system team is primarily focused on reviewing work and enforcing consistency, you’re not running a system team.
You’re running a standards committee.
That’s a critical mistake.
Design standards and design systems are both important, but they serve different purposes.
When you conflate the two, you end up with a team that’s stuck in endless review cycles, slowing down product teams instead of helping them move faster.
Design standards teams focus on evaluation
Primary role: Assess quality after work is produced.
Main activities: Reviews, audits, critiques, design QA.
Goal: Maintain a consistent, accessible, high-quality user experience across the product.
Position: Gatekeeper. Approve or reject.
This is necessary. Every organization that cares about user experience needs a mechanism to enforce standards.
But it is fundamentally reactive work.
Design system teams focus on enablement
Primary role: Create tools that help teams produce high-quality work independently.
Main activities: Build components, patterns, documentation, starter kits, templates.
Goal: Make it easier, faster, and more reliable to produce work that already meets standards.
Position: Enabler. Remove obstacles.
This is proactive work.
Good system teams aren’t just telling people what good looks like. They’re making it easier to achieve good by default.
Why the distinction matters
If your system team spends most of its time reviewing Figma files, holding design critiques, and giving feedback on work that’s already 90% complete, you’re reacting after the hard work is done. That means you’re probably slowing teams down at the most expensive moment: right before launch.
Instead, system teams should be:
Building composable assets and flexible templates
Providing robust, adaptable documentation
Offering clear examples and starter kits that accelerate early-stage design
The better your system team gets at proactive enablement, the less your organization has to rely on painful late-stage reviews.
Good design work flows through strong systems, not around them.
How to reset your design system team
If you realize your system team has drifted into a standards enforcement role, here’s how to course-correct:
Clarify your charter. Explicitly define your team’s mission as enablement, not enforcement. Write it down. Share it widely.
Shift your metrics. Stop measuring success by how many files you review. Start measuring success by how often your assets and guidance are used without intervention.
Rebuild trust through tools. Ask product teams what slows them down. Build solutions that solve those problems before they become quality issues.
Partner with standards teams; don’t replace them. Standards review still needs to happen. But it’s a different discipline. System teams should collaborate with standards reviewers, not become them.
Standards teams audit outcomes
Systems teams shape outcomes.
If you’re doing both at once, you’re probably doing neither well.
Get clear on your role, and you’ll build a system that product teams actually want to use, not just tolerate.
