Most design systems die within a year of launch — not because the components were ugly, but because they were never built with engineering in the room.
A design system built entirely in a design tool, handed to engineering as a finished spec, has a predictable lifespan: it looks perfect in Figma, gets implemented with a dozen small deviations because a component did not account for a real edge case, and within two quarters the design file and the production codebase have quietly diverged into two different systems that nobody trusts.
A button component designed without knowing how long button labels get in five different languages, or how a card component behaves with a title three lines longer than the design mockup, is a component that will be "fixed" ad hoc by whichever engineer hits the edge case first — and every ad hoc fix is a fork of the system. We design every core component alongside an engineer, testing real content lengths and real states (loading, error, empty) before it is called done.
The systems that survive past their second year almost always have a boring answer to "who owns this" and a real process for change — the flashy component library is the easy 20%. The governance is the 80% that determines whether it is still the single source of truth eighteen months later.
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Thirty minutes with the people who would actually do the work — no discovery deck, no account manager.