As a consultant, I know my time with a design system team is temporary. Whether I’m there for weeks or months, I’m on borrowed time.

So I pay close attention to signals. Tiny moments that tell me something is shifting, not just in the product, but in the team itself.

Here’s one of the clearest signs that change is taking root:

When I first arrive, most teams work traditionally in their typical tools: designers in Sketch and Figma, engineers in code editors, product folks in documents and decks.

At some point—typically after introducing and role-playing enough hot potato—I hear a designer say:

Lemme just hop into Storybook real quick and make the change myself.

A designer.

It’s usually a minor tweak: a hex code update, a copy edit, a spacing fix.

They’re not making some grand philosophical statement or career shift.

They’re doing what they normally do: trying to get something done as quickly and well as they can.

But their repertoire of options has organically expanded.

Ownership grows. Separate roles start to come together. Tools become shared. Discipline lines become blurrier. The system becomes something shared.

I’ve found this moment to be a consistent leading indicator of more collaborative changes to come, where an entire team is embracing working software as the real signal of efficacy—and how the broader organization will soon follow.