To run a design studio session, you’ll want to find a dedicated block of time within which you can bring the team together. The room should have good wall space, so you can post the work in progress to the walls as you go. Find ways to have more conversations with your teammates, both work-related and not. Time spent cultivating social ties with your team—eating meals together, for example—can make work-related conversations easier, more honest, and more productive. The output of these sessions typically consists of low-fidelity sketches and wireframes. First, it makes it possible for everyone to contribute, even team members with less sophisticated drawing skills.

As with many ideas in the digital world, digital design systems (which we’ll call design systems for the sake of brevity) are a kind of mash up of all of these ideas. A good design system contains comprehensive documentation of the elements of a design, rules and examples that govern the use of these elements, and crucially, contains the code and other assets that actually implement the design.

Use design patterns that work well in your existing product as the baseline of your design system. Form fields, labels, drop-down menus, radio button placement and behavior, ajax and jquery events, buttons—all of these should be included in the design system, as is illustrated in figure 4-11, which shows the system for salesforce.

This new “center of excellence” was designed to help ge improve its software game. A few years earlier, a strategic review helped the company to see just how central software had become to their business—measured in lines of code, ge was something like the 17th largest software company in the world. And yet they felt they were not treating software development with the focus it deserved. In practice, a design system functions as a single source of truth for the presentation layer of a product. Teams can sketch at the whiteboard and then quickly use the elements found in the design system to assemble a prototype or production-ready frontend.

Second, it’s critical to maintaining the malleability of the work. This gives the team the ability to pivot quickly if their tests reveal that the approach isn’t working.