5 Tips to Know Before Building a Design System

About this talk

This talk at NGRome MMXXIV — the largest Italian Angular conference — explored what teams wish they had known before embarking on building a design system. Using Dynatrace's Barista design system as a reference point, the session walked through five hard-earned lessons covering everything from token strategy and multi-framework component libraries to documentation culture, governance, and treating the design system as a product that must earn adoption.

Key takeaways

• A design system is a product — it needs a clear owner, a roadmap, and real adoption metrics
• Design tokens are the foundation: establish them early or pay a steep refactoring cost later
• Building for Angular (or any single framework) has hidden trade-offs — plan your component distribution strategy upfront
• Documentation and developer experience are not optional extras; they decide whether the system lives or gets abandoned
• Accessibility should be baked in from day one, not retrofitted across dozens of components