You don't need a dedicated systems team to stay consistent. Here's the lightweight version we set up for startups.
Big-company design systems come with governance, roadmaps and a team to run them. A five-person startup needs something much smaller that still stops the product from drifting.
What we include
- Colour, type and spacing tokens shared by design and code
- Fifteen to twenty core components, not two hundred
- One page of rules for when to make a new component
We name things the same way in Figma and in the codebase, so a designer and an engineer can talk about "the card" and mean the same thing.
Let it grow with the product
A system should be added to when a pattern repeats three times, not before. That keeps it small, useful and easy for new hires to learn in an afternoon.