Design Systems as a practice is a relatively young and growing part of the design and engineering community. For many design systems, they are built at different stages of a company’s life—for older companies, to manage the chaos and debt of existing design and product decisions, for younger companies to wrangle a growing organization and team to help them scale for the future.
As DoorDash’s first product designer and frontend engineer, Kathryn has seen the impact of building a design system from the very earliest days as a small, scrappy team of 8 engineers and 1 designer, all the way to IPO in 2020, to a company now with thousands of engineers and a design team of a 100+. She’ll talk through the lessons she’s learned, the ways she and her team have adapted to the different needs of a company at different stages, how no matter what stage you’re at as a company, you can find value in a design systems practice.
