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If you’ve worked on a design system, you’ve likely experienced the dreaded “reorg,” short for “reorganization,” a structural change within an organization that affects how teams, roles, and responsibilities are arranged. It can involve shifting reporting structures, merging or splitting departments, redistributing resources, or redefining strategic priorities.
Just when your efforts start gaining traction aligning teams, growing adoption, and stabilizing workflows, everything changes. Leadership shuffles teams, new priorities emerge, and suddenly, your design system is left in limbo.
It’s frustrating. It’s exhausting. And it’s all too common.
Reorgs can feel like the enemy of progress. The champions you worked so hard to win over may no longer be in the same roles. Your budget could be slashed. Your once-clear roadmap might be wiped clean.
And the worst part? You rarely have a say in any of it.
Why Reorgs Feel Like Setbacks
Reorgs disrupt everything. They introduce uncertainty, slow down momentum, and create new barriers where there were none before. Here’s why they’re especially challenging for design systems:
Loss of champions. Leadership changes often mean losing advocates who supported your work.
Shifting priorities. New org structures bring new goals, which may not include your design system.
Team disbandment. If your design system team gets absorbed into other groups, focus can be lost.
Funding instability. Budget allocations may change, leaving your work deprioritized.
When faced with a reorg, many design system teams find themselves in survival mode, struggling to prove their value all over again.
The Unexpected Opportunity in Reorgs
Here’s the twist: sometimes, the work you’re doing in design systems is so impactful that it forces the organization to rethink how teams are structured.
At their core, design systems reveal inefficiencies. They expose misalignment between design, engineering, and product. They highlight redundancies in tooling, workflows, and decision-making. They make it painfully clear where teams are duplicating effort instead of working together.
When leadership sees that misalignment clearly, it can spark an organizational shift, not to kill the design system, but to make sure it’s actually positioned to succeed.
For example:
A design system effort might uncover that design and engineering teams are too siloed, leading leadership to merge them under a unified design ops function.
A successful design system might make leadership realize that maintaining it is a full-time job, prompting the creation of a dedicated design system team.
Standardizing UI components might expose inefficiencies in how product teams build and ship, leading to a restructure that prioritizes system adoption.
When done right, a design system doesn’t just change how teams design. It changes how teams work together. And sometimes, the best way for an organization to fully realize the value of a design system is to restructure around it.
If you’re in the middle of a reorg and feeling discouraged, here’s the mindset shift: reorgs aren’t just an obstacle to your work. They can be a sign that your work matters.
Yes, reorgs can be frustrating. Yes, they can feel like starting over. But they can also be the clearest sign that leadership sees the value in what you’re building. When a reorg moves your team, shifts your stakeholders, or even creates a new design system function, it’s because decision-makers recognize that design system work is shaping the way the company operates.
So, instead of seeing a reorg as a death sentence for your design system, consider this:
Look for the why. What problem is the reorg trying to solve? How does design system work fit into that narrative?
Use it as leverage. A reorg is an opportunity to advocate for better placement, resources, and visibility for design systems.
Find new allies. Reorgs shift relationships. Connect with new leaders and stakeholders who now have a reason to care about the design system.
Recognize that change is inevitable. Design systems evolve just like organizations do. What seems like a setback today could be the very thing that enables your design system’s long-term success.
As Spencer Johnson wrote in the famed allegory Who Moved My Cheese?:
The quicker you let go of old cheese, the sooner you find new cheese.
Instead of clinging to how things were, the most successful design system teams move forward quickly, embracing the new structure and leveraging it for greater impact.
If your design system is affected by a reorg, don’t just brace for impact. Embrace the opportunity. Instead of seeing it as a roadblock, see it as proof that your work is important enough to warrant organizational change. The best design systems don’t just survive reorgs; they shape them.
That’s a sign that you’re doing something right.
