Most conversation around the return on investment (ROI) for design system work centers around a few common things:

• How much time is saved by a team implementing the design system

• The value of the new things a design system user is able to create

  
  

But before we can evaluate these kinds of things, there’s an earlier bar a team has to clear: the cost of the team. The common behavior of design system teams is that they’re starting from zero and have to create value. But the truth is even more disheartening: you’re starting at a deficit.

Assuming an average annual salary for a design system team member is $100k—it’s typically higher, but I’m rounding down to keep the math easy—a 2-person team costs $200k/year. A 2-person team has to create $200k of value in a year just to break-even.

A 6-person team costs $600k/year. A 6-person team has to create $600k of value in a year just to break-even.

Otherwise, a design system team would actually save more money for the company by not working there, or at least working on something more value-creating than a design system.

That’s a hard truth to stomach.

This is the exact kind of math that leads executives to defund and/or reallocate design system teams.

But before you embrace design system nihilism, there are a few things you can do to make sure your work always breaks even at the very least:

Know your numbers

There are a few specific numbers you’ll need to always have on hand to make sure you’re working on valuable things for your organization.

If you work on a 5-person design system team, an average $100k annual salary means that your team costs $41,66.67/month ((100,000 × 5) ÷ 12).

Assuming you can ship 1 component every month, that component must save your organization at least $41,666.67. Not every component will do this. A lot of design system teams like to spend their time on foundations, but that kind of work takes time to do well. You might spend a month creating scalable, sturdy versions of a Button component and only save teams 2 hours of work. It doesn’t make sense to spend $41,666.67 to save $96.15 ($100,000 annual salary ÷ 2,080 working hours in a year × 2 hours).

Many teams rely on scale to solve this problem. The logic goes like this: “saving 1 person time on a button may only save $96.15, but it really adds up at scale.” Let’s play it out. In order to break even on the button component, you need at least 434 people to use your Button component ($41,666.67 design system team monthly cost ÷ $96.15 savings/person). For an organization with 30 designers and 30 engineers, it’s not worth it. For an organization with 3,000 designers and 3,000 engineers, it becomes much more plausible. Make sure you’re actually working at the scale you’re promising.

Related, make sure you’re always working at the scale you’re promising. I’ve seen too many design system teams that decide to work on a component that an important feature team needs. They act more as an internal agency or staff augmentation to that feature team, and the math never adds up. They spend $40k on work that only saves $10k. And they never realize it 1) the feature team is really appreciate which makes the design system team feel great and 2) because they never did the math.

The key is this: focus your attention on things that take others a long time to create that would take your team a short amount of time to create. That seems simple at face value, but design system teams rarely do it. Sturdy, scalable design system work is usually slow, but it doesn’t always have to be. Find the things that you can be slow at that other teams are even slower at. Which is a different way to say: work on things that would take you less time to create than your users. What could you create in 2 weeks that would take others 4 weeks to create? What could you create in 4 weeks that would take others 8 weeks to create? There are probably only a handful of components that fit this criteria, and that’s where your design system team should spend its time.