Mapping in-house design knowledge and its impact — After 5 years working as an in-house B2B product designer, I started to wonder if I am a good designer because I knew both our products and internal politics well enough to deliver results, or because I was indeed a…

For many years I struggled with documenting UX patterns for a design system we’ve created in-house. Everything else went relatively smooth — the code, the components, even advocacy and adoption by the rest of organisation, but not the patterns. This might sound as a trivial task for some, but for…

A Simple Way to Manage Organisational Complexity — Retrospectives We are all familiar with Retrospectives. They do come in many shapes (from what went well to a sailboat and beyond). Traditionally, during a Retro, a team reflects on their work and suggests improvements after completing a certain milestone or a sprint. Even though, a team might cover a…

Six years have passed since I published my previous article about affordable sustainable fashion for men. A lot has changed. What was a niche within a niche, now became a mainstream. There is hardly any clothing brand out there that doesn’t have an “organic cotton” or “from sustainable sources” or…

A small component from your new UI is not in a design system. And you just had a conversation with product developers how they love your idea, but there is little time left. Asking design system manager to prioritise this component won’t help, as their backlog is already overwhelmingly full…

“A beginning is a very delicate time” ― Frank Herbert After introduction of a Systemic Design Approach in April 2021 the discussion about the ways to apply systems thinking in a design work has finally moved from a niche to a mainstream topic. This encouraged me to put myself together…

The time has come for systems thinking to take its rightful place in UX, to help product designers tackle organisational complexity — “Realpolitik refers to politics-driven practical, or pragmatic concerns, rather than ideological ones. Basically it is the idea that in politics compromise is often necessary, and that pragmatism, rather than ideology, should be a guiding force.” (1.) Last year I was involved in a…

Foreword Many self-started design system teams eventually reach the level of maturity, where they no more consist of spare timers or allocated individuals, but ready to become a fully fledged team. Same happened with us — when the first full-time member joined our virtual team — we had to decide how…

“It is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.” Russell Ackoff During Helsinki Design Systems meetup, I was asked if there were any tips on how a designer could start a design system project when there seemed to be no initiative from the upper management…