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Summary
Having a design system is a de facto necessity when building cohesive enterprise software. The challenge is how does it all come together with a single location, a source of truth, a website? How does a cross-functional team marshal the resources with political and technical willpower to achieve this goal? It’s no easy feat as Jennie Yip, Atlassian design systems lead, explains in this Medium essay. This fireside chat will dig deeper into the problems addressed and lessons learned, with Jennie and also Charles Lee, the engineering lead. Hearing their stories will inspire and inform all of us in our design system journeys. We hope you will join us!
Key Insights
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Inconsistencies between design specs, Figma, Sketch, and code caused user confusion and mistrust of documentation.
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Atlassian’s Constellation project aims to create a single source of truth unifying designer and developer documentation.
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Live code examples embedded in documentation replace static images, ensuring up-to-date and interactive component previews.
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Collaboration and early involvement between designers and engineers are critical to successful design system evolution.
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The project spanned multiple years and team changes, requiring extensive documentation and ‘run books’ for onboarding.
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Governance is framed as shared execution rather than policing, fostering buy-in instead of compliance tension.
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Design tokens improve handoff accuracy, although integration with Figma is still partly manual and evolving.
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Multiple local design systems coexist alongside the central system, typically as downstream consumers of core components.
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Roadmap alignment between platform teams and product teams remains one of the biggest operational challenges.
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Extensive user research including usability tests and tree card sorts informed navigation, IA, and content strategy.
Notable Quotes
"Kate considers live code to be the source of truth because she can’t trust the design site due to inconsistencies."
"If engineers don’t like what we’re doing, they absolutely will not adopt our design system."
"Governance shouldn’t be policing; we’re here to help create the best experience and save time."
"This project has a lot of history and required synthesizing findings from many people over years."
"Design systems reflect organizational structure – if designers and engineers are siloed, no tooling will fix that."
"Updating and adopting design system components requires company time and planning—for some teams, fast release cycles were too frequent to keep up."
"Docs as code is a philosophy that keeps documentation in workflows familiar to content designers and engineers alike."
"Prior prototypes and documentation of pain points helped pave the way and garner stakeholder buy-in for Constellation."
"We use MDX and markdown so designers can edit documentation directly through pull requests."
"Empathy on both sides is key—engineers need scoped work, designers need to understand engineering constraints."
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