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A lot of companies are evolving their style and brand guides into design systems. By doing so they’re making their product and engineering organizations more productive. Their products are beautiful and easy for people to use. Because of this success, design systems continue to grow in popularity at a rapid rate. In some cases, they can even influence their business’ revenue.

Companies with design systems are sharing them with the community. Public facing design system libraries and GitHub hosted design systems are the norm. It can also be a great recruiting and PR tool for your design and development teams.

Design systems are essential for internal teams. But there’s a major difference when a digital product’s system serves internal teams and customers.

Airbnb, Instacart, WeWork, Buzzfeed, Cloudflare and Morningstar are a few well known companies with public design systems. Who uses these systems? A designer looking for inspiration? A developer looking to learn more about implementing a new technology ? Sure, design systems from these companies are good resources for designers and developers but their purpose is for internal use.

There’s a big difference between those design systems and others by Salesforce, IBM, Shopify, Automattic, Dropbox, GE Digital and Google. These software companies have a customer community building applications on their developer platforms. The customer economy relies on and thrives with resources like design systems. Enterprise design systems are being built for both internal use and for customers.

Let’s look at Salesforce as an example. IDC projects Salesforce to directly create 3.3 million jobs by 2022. This number includes administrators customers will need to hire. It includes consultants customers will hire. It includes partners who are building applications on top of Salesforce. IDC says admins, consultants and partners project $859 billion in new business revenues by 2022.

Admins, consultants and partners will all be customizing Salesforce. They will rely on Salesforce’s Lightning Design System to build their applications. IDC reports every dollar Salesforce receives, the economy building applications on the platform will receive $5.18 by 2022.

Design system teams have enormous responsibility when both customers and internal teams are reliant on their system.

Similar customer economies exist for IBM, Shopify, Google, etc. as well. There is an added business impact of a design system on top of the internal needs. The level of effort increases when making simple enhancements like creating a new component or token. It increases the level of impact when deprecating a component. When there is a business impact like this, a design system becomes a product.

A product needs a product manager to represent business goals, prioritize work and manage resources. A product needs other team resources like dedicated user research, producers and writers to support its growth. When a design system’s impact grows, companies need to treat it accordingly.

Design systems don’t bring in revenue themselves, but they benefit platform adoption. Adoption ties to revenue. This means systems are becoming more of a product than an internal tool to help productivity. Will this help or hurt the future of design systems?

<a href="https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href">https://medium.com/media/b85dfbb5286d8a25cf2e754b9462cf45/href</a>

Do Design Systems Bring Revenue to a Business? was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Do Design Systems Bring Revenue to a Business?

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