In my early days at Lithia & Driveway, I was on the design system team. My design partner and I took a lightweight component library to a full-fledged design system. We connected with engineering to establish which components actually existed in production, then rebuilt each one in Figma from the ground up to achieve stronger parity with component structure and props in code. We stood up design system documentation, and then I interviewed engineers from every feature team to establish a design spec standard that truly served how they worked, and a spec review process that ensured adoption by both designers and engineers.

As Ben Callahan says, "Your design system won't make your products more consistent. People will make what they want to make. Your job is to change what they want to make. Culture is what creates consistency."