Orbit Design System
Getting the system adopted
A system nobody used, and the work that changed that.
- 41
- teams adopted
- 19 → 2
- duplicate buttons
- Role
- Design Systems Lead
- Timeline
- 2 quarters · 2023
- Team
- 3 designers, 2 engineers
- Platform
- Web · Internal tools
Problem
The library was complete and well documented, and three teams used it. Everyone else kept copying components into their own repos.
Interviews turned up one answer repeatedly: adopting it meant a migration nobody had time to schedule.
Approach
We stopped asking teams to migrate. The system shipped a codemod for the six components that covered most usage, and we sat with each team for the first afternoon.
Release notes changed from listing what was new to naming what a team could delete.
Outcome
Adoption went from three teams to forty-one over two quarters, and the number of duplicated button implementations in the org went from nineteen to two.