So, you just introduced a design system approach at your organization? Congratulations! You and your team are on the right track to a more efficient process of developing higher quality products. Unfortunately, things might go wrong along the way and, instead of improving your team’s velocity and product they can slow you down or even fail the whole project. In order to detect such culprits earlier, avoid them, and help you stay on the right track, I’m offering my guidance and leadership during all phases of the design system adoption:

Phase 1 — Adoption

This is the most important phase. Critical decisions about design principles, technology, the API design, etc. are going to be made during this phase. Getting it right is crucial for the success of the whole project. The result of this phase is a shared styleguide (also known as a pattern library) that documents principles, foundation, and components of your design system.

Phase 2 — Active Usage

This is where you should start noticing the real benefits of having the design system. Your team should become more productive and confident using the component library. This is also a phase where most of the edge cases going to be visible so reacting appropriately and adapting the design system is very important.

Phase 3 — Maintenance

During this phase long-term processes and strategies has to be defined. How to do updates of the component library, how to communicate changes, how to make the design process more transparent so everyone feels involved.

Pricing

Depending on your project, size, and qualification of your team, different amount of external help is going to be needed. Good news are: as your design system evolves, and your team become productive, it will require less attention. I recommend following packages depending on the phase:

• up to 2 full-time days a week remote — 6000 € / month. This is good during phase 1 when there are lots of decision can be made every day.

• up to 1 day a week remote — 3500 € / month. Good for the phase 2 when things are still being changed but on a less frequent basis.

• up to 2 days per month remote — 2000 € / month. Fits the maintenance phase well when the decisions aren’t that time critical and can be done in a more async way.

Service includes contributing to the component-library code and documentation, writing down processes, performing pair-programming, conducting code reviews, talking to team members on Slack, jumping on Zoom calls, and answering most urgent questions related to the project’s design system, component library, and general software architecture.

For each package I’m offering my presence in your Slack so people can reach out to me with urgent questions.

Minimum length is 3 months paid monthly. When necessary, additional services can be provided on a daily-based basis at 1200 € / day.