Design

Design systems that survive their second year

A component library is easy to launch and hard to keep. These are the habits that decide which way it goes.

Meera Iyer 21 Sep 2026 1 min read
Design systems that survive their second year

Ownership beats documentation

The short version: teams do not fail here because they lack effort. They fail because nobody wrote down which decision belongs to whom.

  • Give every component a named owner who reviews changes.
  • Version the tokens separately from the components.
  • Delete unused variants aggressively; every one you keep is a future support cost.

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