Our team began the design process by kicking off audits of the patterns currently in use across our existing products, the management dashboards of key competitors, and of existing design systems that we could learn from.
The design system was not only a tool to introduce consistency and efficiency into internal UX work. It was a tool to quickly disseminate basic standards across dozens of scrum teams across the world working on hundreds of product components. When a new contractor started or a new jira story was flagged, any UX designer could grab a link to the detailed documentation and send it along.
A good design system is an ongoing project. The challenge is to build processes to keep it active and managed by both designers and engineers. Our library in Sketch grew in tandem with the first release of Project Voltron. By the time I left it had evolved into a much more mature and organized set of patterns. I collaborated with our principal frontend developers to establish a corresponding react component library and Storybook instance that served as a single source of truth for the component styles across many products and code bases. We maintained a regular cadence with frontend developers to discuss new components and make updates to existing ones.