A design system doesn’t need a dedicated team on day one — it needs clear ownership, naming that matches the product, and a place where decisions are recorded so they don’t get re-litigated every sprint.

I bias toward tokens and primitives that map to how designers actually work: spacing, type scales, and states that engineers can implement without one-off CSS. Storybook (or similar) becomes the contract between design and code.

The system should earn trust by reducing surprise: predictable APIs for components, visual regression where it matters, and a path for “exceptions” that doesn’t fork the whole stack.