Content and design systems

Based on my experience with similarly-sized design system efforts, quite a few teams would benefit from that focus.

At what point, though, do we discuss that the org coordination, communication, and collaboration problems are where system-and-standards efforts always grind?

I don’t mean that dismissively, either! Those org people and process issues underly many other kinds of system failures. Content architecture, api/infra standardization efforts, multi/omnichannel pushes…

The design system issues that result? Just one head of the hydra…

Planning, getting buy-in, executing deployment, and continuing to maintain the shared vocabularies, systems of coordination, and organizational roles that underly communications systems (both content and design)? All critical parts of the puzzle.

And —whew! — efforts that start and remain focused on one part of an org’s communication architecture (“Structured content!” “Design pattern library!” “Decoupling!”) consistently grind to a halt when those foundational elements don’t match what’s happening in other disciplines.

Vigorous, Kermit-style, arm-waving rants about this kind of stuff, that’s my brand! But in all seriousness, coordination and ongoing management of content+design systems is broken in so many orgs that it spurred @karenmcgrane and @beep and I to start @autogram_is.

We desperately need cross-disciplinary brainstorming about these issues, not just deeper and deeper specialization. New design tools, new development frameworks, better content schemas, next-gen CMSs, can only accelerate what a team already understands.