Converge US 2023: Sarrah Vesselov - Leading design systems in impossible circumstances

⚠️ We apologize - the recording had technical issues. Some of Sarrah’s audio is missing and some of it isn’t coming from the main mic. Converge is zeroheight’s one-day design systems conference. On May 18, 2023, we hosted Converge US in San Francisco at the Great Star Theater! Converge aims to bring together some of the brightest and best in design systems and design ops to discuss the challenges we face in taking design systems to the next level.

Sarrah is the Director of Design at Honeycomb.io and based out of Zephyrhills, Florida.

Last year, Sarrah talked at Hatch Conf about how their design system, Lattice, had stalled and was essentially dead in the water. Through some tough conversations, She realized that as a leader, she needed to prioritize it. No more working on it in spurts and keeping things moving at a snail’s pace.

Fast forward to quarter one of this year. They had secured a dedicated spot on the roadmap for Lattice with a PM, Engineering, and Design dedicated to the effort. They had one quarter to make as much headway as possible in evolving our design system into something the whole company could use. That meant considering the elephant in the room – there was no design systems team to pick up the effort after this quarter. How could they ensure they would end up in a different place than before? What could they do in that time to get other teams to adopt and use Lattice in their day-to-day development? Most importantly, who would own the process of adding and developing components once the effort was “over”?

In this talk, Sarrah will go into how they approached it from three distinct perspectives: The design Director (getting support and buy-in), The Designer (coordinating with PM, Eng, and the design team to plan and execute), and The Engineer (coordinating with PM, Design, and working on component migration and development).

Sarrah Vesselov: https://twitter.com/SVesselov Conference host: Michelle Chin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelletchin/ About Converge US: https://zeroheight.com/converge-us

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