Roles and teams
Design systems designer
Also calledDesign system designer
A designer whose users are other designers and engineers: they build and maintain the shared components and rules a whole product is made from.
Where a product designer ships features, a design systems designer ships the parts features are built from: components, patterns, tokens and the documentation that explains when to use each one.
The payoff is like a tax cut on every future feature. Each team builds faster and more consistently because the decisions have already been made once. The cost comes first, so the role usually runs at a loss in its first year.
Common mistake
Funding the role too early. Below roughly six designers or forty engineers, a component library maintained by the product designers themselves is usually enough.