I’ve worked with a lot of design system teams who proudly say:

“We’re building tokens, components, documentation, tooling, accessibility, design-to-code workflows, contributor guidelines, and content patterns… all at once.”

To which I reply:

“Great! Which one of those is the most important?”

Because here’s the truth:

If everything’s a priority, nothing really is.

Or, by way of one of my favorite ancient proverbs:

“If you chase two rabbits, you will catch neither.”

The illusion of parallel progress

Design systems feel like they should be built in parallel.

Designers build the kit. Engineers build components. PMs write a roadmap.

But what often happens?

Work drifts. Dependencies stall. People burn out. Nothing ships.

A design system is a startup

Think like a founder.

If you had six months of runway, what feature would most prove the system’s value to your organization?

That’s your real priority.

Everything else can wait.

How to find your design system’s “point of highest leverage”

Ask:

• What’s the most repeated pain point in product teams?

• What’s the most adopted part of our system so far?

• What’s the smallest win that would unlock bigger ones?

Ruthlessly focus on that.

Shifting from “coverage” to “crucial”

One design system team I coached was trying to build lots of things for multiple platforms simultaneously.

I encourage them to find the most important thing.

After some digging, we discovered that message components for iOS applications were the most needed area of help.

We cut everything else out.

Product teams loved it. Adoption tripled. Momentum soared.

And it created breathing room to build the rest.