The prospect of a having design system comes with some pretty bold promises. Organizations expect that, at the very least, a design system will make them more efficient, saving a substantial amount of hours of work. Articles like Jules Mahé’s What is the value of a design system, Romina Kavcic’s A guide for calculating design system costs, and Dr.-Ing. Maximilian Speicher ’s & Guido Baena Wehrmann’s One Formula To Rule Them All: The ROI Of A Design System all calculate that design systems typically save somewhere in the range of tens of thousands of hours, leading to 7 or 8 figures of recouped costs.

The challenge with promising such a bounty is well-described through this graph entitled “The Design System Efficiency Curve” from Ben Callahan’s article, The Never-Ending Job of Selling Design Systems:

In product management, there’s a concept called Time to Value. It represents the time it takes to deliver a product to its end users so they can make use of it and gain its value.

For design systems, the time to value is realized just after teams cross the threshold into positive productivity with the design system.

Because design system work is so complex, time to value is often long. Most of the teams I’ve observed take anywhere from 6 months to 2 years to reach time to value.

Unfortunately, design system sponsoring executives often reach their impatience line before time to value is achieved.

Reaching the impatience line comes with dire consequences, ranging in their severity and impact. On the low end of the scale, design system sponsors may lose interest in the design system and turn their attention elsewhere, causing even the most exciting design system wins to fall on deaf ears. On the most extreme end, design system sponsors may call any design system investment a bust and subsequently defund and reallocate the team to other endeavors.

The greater the distance between the impatience line and time to value, the more at risk the initiative to establish a design system practice is.

On its face, it’s just business. Initiatives get funded and defunded all the time. Organizations constantly take varying degrees of risk, and not all of them pay off.

But there are 2 specific things that really chafe when it comes to applying this dynamic to design system work.

First, the impatience line usually arrives as a surprise. This is particularly gaslight-y juxtaposed against the major amounts of excitement and “we really believe in this” sentiments that come with the start of design system work.

Secondly, the impatience line always happens at the worst time to quit. It’s when the team has already pushed to its brink of physical—and, more importantly, emotional—effort. If we were going to quit, couldn’t we have quit before all the hard work?

Marketer Seth Godin describes it well in his book, The Dip:

Snowboarding is a hip sport. It’s fast, exciting, and reasonably priced; and it makes you look very cool. So why are there so few snowboarders? Because learning the basic skills constitutes a painful Dip. It takes a few days to get the hang of it, and, during those few days, you’ll get pretty banged up. It’s easier to quit than it is to keep going. The brave thing to do is to tough it out and end up on the other side—getting all the benefits that come from scarcity. The mature thing is not even to bother starting to snowboard because you’re probably not going to make it through the Dip. And the stupid thing to do is to start, give it your best shot, waste a lot of time and money, and quit right in the middle of the Dip.

Knowing that the danger zone between the impatience line and time to value exists, what can you do to better anticipate and address it?

• Easier said that done, but the best solution is to ensure that time to value happens before the impatience line is reached. (That’s why we picked 90 days as the targeted timeframe to set up a design system: realizing value in 90 days is typically very fast for enterprise organizations.)

• Identify the impatience line as early as you can. When you’re first starting a design system effort, ask your stakeholders directly, “How much time do we have before you consider this investment no longer worthwhile?” Then hold them to that answer.

• Send updates constantly about how close you are to realizing value. As Godin also says in The Dip, “No one quits the Boston Marathon at mile 25.” Every update helps your stakeholders envision the finish line and can incrementally push off the impatience line, effectively narrowing the danger zone.

Finally, this leads us to one of the most important—though often elusive—ingredients for a successful design system initiative: a patient executive.