There are many different kinds of design systems. You can create and employ any one or a combination of these at your organization.

Because of that, design system teams can resemble a smörgåsbord of activities and responsibilities. Here are some roles I’ve seen design system teams take on:

• Definer of organizational best practices

• Collector of common components and patterns

• Distributor/pipeline manager of common assets, like tokens and icons

• Creator of new standards

• Enforcer of current standards and best practices

• Skunkworks/experimentation team of product design org

• Central service that fulfills design and engineering requests for rest of org

• Standards body that encourages/discourages emerging UI trends

Your design system team can be one, all, or none of these.

Pick the ones you need right now and don’t worry about the ones you don’t.