4 Things I Know About Pattern Libraries
Dave has got back into his writing and included some very valuable lessons for anyone working on, or thinking about working on, pattern libraries or design systems. My favourite part of the article is
“Plainly, people who sign checks don’t give a sh** about your components until they see the full pages.”
Unless your development team has an abnormal degree of autonomy, there’s a lot of politicking that has to take place to secure development cycles to revamp pages that aren’t broken. “I need a day in the sprint cycle to make this page look basically the same, then I need to do that a few dozen times” is a tough argument to make to people who budget the hours.
We know it’ll speed up new feature development in the long run. But developers have a tendency to burn everything to the ground and start over. We’re at war with this instinct and not everyone can see the benefits of refactoring/re-architecting when there’s a mile-long backlog.
An excerpt from 4 Things I Know About Pattern Libraries
