[staysaasy]

The hardest part of building a design system is getting the organizational willpower to commit to it. There will always be another high priority feature to build, so to get it done you generally need executive level sponsorship.

Design systems are valuable but ultimately best tackled as an accelerant (/luxury) investment at scale. Your customers are unlikely to buy your product or churn from it due to not having a design system in place, so you really need to look at overall design/dev productivity as the benchmark of whether the investment is worthwhile.

[bastawhiz]

Lots of companies fail with their design systems because they only commit design resources to them. If you send a perfect Figma mock to your engineers, they'll build it however they want. Unless you have common components that are treated with care and have dedicated engineering resources, it's an uphill battle to actually reap the benefits of the design system.

The whole point should be the DX and productivity benefits you get from the design system. If you don't invest in making it "the easy way" to build a product or feature, teams won't use it well, will see no benefit, will ship more slowly, and have a net negative effect on your customer's experience.

[PragmaticPulp]

At a startup, a design system shouldn't require so much effort that it requires executive sponsorship. Ideally, the team would start with an existing design system and tweak it to match their target look.

For startups specifically, I suggest getting buy-in on the first few sets of UI screens first. Second, extract common elements into the design system to use as a guide for subsequent designs.

Focusing too much on the design system before the look and feel of the main app screens has been settled is a waste of time. People look at screens, not design elements.