Governance Strategy Selector

How many product teams will need to consume and contribute to the Design System in the next 12 months?

Early-stage: mostly UI kit + emerging foundations

Mid-stage: used across multiple products but not standardized

Advanced: integrated in build pipelines, documented, monitored

Centralized, top-down. Clear ownership is expected.

Hybrid, some autonomy exists, but alignment is still negotiated.

Highly distributed, many teams operate independently.

A dedicated core team with limited bandwidth for external input

A part-time core team with support from chapter leads or design managers

No fixed core team. The system is maintained through collective effort

Scale across teams without central bottlenecks