Cadence

The company had two failed design systems behind it. Both were technically fine. Both were ignored, because they arrived as a decree from a team nobody had met, documenting decisions nobody had been asked about.

Ship the reasoning, not just the component

Every component documents what it is for and — the part that changed adoption — what it is not for, with a link to the pattern you should use instead. A button page that tells you when not to use a button is a page engineers trust.

Forty components, not four hundred

The scope was fixed early and defended: cover what four product teams actually assemble screens out of, and refuse everything else until three teams have independently hand-rolled it. Six components got added that way in a year. Two got deleted.

The printed sheet

The specimen exists on paper as well as in the browser, pinned above four desks. It is not nostalgia — a wall-sized view of the whole system is the fastest way to notice that you have three things that do the same job, and nobody has ever noticed that by scrolling.