Most organisations buy a component library, call it a design system, and are confused eighteen months later when the product looks less coherent than before.
A component library is an answer key. A design system is the method that produced the answers — which means it can answer the question you have not asked yet.
Tokens over components
Components go stale the moment the product does something new. Tokens — the spacing rhythm, the type scale, the surface levels, the motion durations — survive, because they describe intent rather than output.
If a new screen can be built from the tokens by someone who has never seen the library, the system is working.
Write down the arguments
The most valuable page in any system we have built is the one that records decisions nobody can otherwise remember: why the radius is 8px everywhere except the pill labels, why error red appears in exactly one context, why headings never mix the serif and the sans.
Without that page, every one of those decisions gets relitigated by whoever joins next.
Governance is the whole job
A system with no owner degrades in a quarter. Not because people are careless, but because shipping is urgent and consistency never is. Someone has to be allowed to say no, and everyone has to know who that is.
