
Design System Office Hours
By Davy Fung + PJ Onori
Davy and PJ, design system practitioners talk about design-led product ownership, scaling and adoption, community and engagement, design system team models, and much more.

Ep 29: Early Career Designers w/ Val Poon
Ep 29: Early Career Designers w/ Val Poon
Design System Office HoursMar 13, 2023
00:00
25:53

Ep 29: Early Career Designers w/ Val Poon
Ep 29: Early Career Designers w/ Val Poon
Looking to learn more about design systems with some friends of the program, we talk to Val Poon, an early career designer at Info-Tech Research Group.
Mar 13, 202325:53

Ep 28: AI, Allen Iverson
Ep 28: AI, Allen Iverson
With all this chat (pun included) about ChatGPT, how else can we utilize some programmable help with AI and automation. Plus, the differences between a sweet potato and a yam.
Episode Transcripts
Feb 27, 202334:26

Ep 27: Listener Questions
Ep 27: Listener Questions
Davy and PJ answer listener questions that came in from some friends of the program. We touch on fun component library design only components, governance, office hours issue tracking, documentation, interviewing, and much more.
Episode Transcripts
Feb 13, 202339:23

Ep 26: Design System Roles
Ep 26: Design System Roles
With the rise of design system teams in orgs, Davy and PJ talk about how their roles have progressed through product design, and design ops. How have things changed while we have come in and out of IC management? Today in our roles, what does IC leadership in Design Systems look like for us?
Episode Transcripts
Jan 30, 202338:43

Ep 25: Happy Birthday, Best of '22
Ep 25: Happy Birthday, Best of '22
Happy 2023 and 1st birthday to the podcast! We got a treat for those new the program, our greatest hits from the first 20 episodes. Timestamps: Ep 9: ROI (02:08), Ep 10: Hindsight (07:00), Ep 13: Feedback (11:42), Ep 18: Contributions (15:38), Ep 20: Education and Onboarding (19:59), Ep 2: Design Technologists (25:00), Ep 3: Releases (28:33), Ep 5: Figma is NOT a DS (30:54), Ep 6: Mandates (38:55), Ep 7: JIRA MORMONT (43:33).
Jan 17, 202349:50

Ep 24: Lets Scale This Thing, Year 2 and So On
Ep 24: Lets Scale This Thing, Year 2 and So On
Welcome to the show 2023, even tho this was recorded in 2022. This is the last of our trilogy series, about how to get started in Design Systems. What happens after you get to year 2 and so on? Is your job done because everyone is bought in and good actors and advocates supporting the system?
Episode Transcripts
Jan 05, 202332:20

Ep 23: Lets Keep it Goin, Year 1-2
Ep 23: Lets Keep it Goin, Year 1-2
2nd in our series of the first years of design systems, Davy and PJ talk about how to grow the team, and where we have decided on our teams to focus on; which of the design system knobs, library, education, documentation, we decided to turn.
Episode Transcript
Dec 13, 202233:30

Ep 22: Let's Get Started, Year 0-1
Ep 22: Let's Get Started, Year 0-1
Originally episode 21, if not for our last special episode on layoffs, we talk about how to get a design system up and running, and things we looked to achieve in years 0-1. This ep is the first in a series of 3 episodes about getting started in design systems.
Episode Transcripts
Nov 30, 202233:48

Ep 21: ROI During Layoffs
Ep 21: ROI During Layoffs
During this rough week at Meta and Twitter, Davy and PJ discuss how to continuously prove ROI for yourself and your team in the light of operating on leaner teams.
Episode Transcripts
Nov 10, 202232:47

Ep 20: Education and Onboarding
Ep 20: Education and Onboarding
Happy Halloween and 20th episode to us! Davy and PJ talk about how their teams support educating designers and the continuous task of training product designers, whether they are new to the org, or just new to the design system.
Episode Transcripts
Oct 31, 202236:40

Ep 19: Team Models
Ep 19: Team Models
Davy and PJ talk about different design system team make ups at Disney Streaming, Meta, and Pinterest. How federated vs centralized have worked for them; and how big does your team need to be?
Episode Transcripts
Oct 21, 202232:30

Ep 18: Contributions
Ep 18: Contributions
Davy and PJ talk about how they're thinking about contribution models on their teams and mechanisms to get better XFN collaboration between design and engineering.
Episode Transcripts
Oct 05, 202233:17

Ep 17.5 Long Live Figma (BONUS)
Ep 17.5 Long Live Figma (BONUS)
Davy and PJ react to the earth-shattering news that Adobe is “teaming up" with Figma, and what that may or may not mean to us.
Episode Transcripts
Sep 19, 202235:26

Ep 17: Copy Cats and Mimicry
Ep 17: Copy Cats and Mimicry
Davy and PJ discuss issues with copy cat design patterns and frameworks. What might work for your company may not work for the next. Design systems is not one size fits all, but fits most.
Episode Transcripts
Sep 15, 202233:03

Ep 16: Automation
Ep 16: Automation
Davy talks with PJ about various ways of automating design system and design ops tasks to help our day-to-day lives as worker-bees easier.
Episode Transcripts
Aug 31, 202234:53

Ep 15: Support
Ep 15: Support
Davy and PJ talk about their methods of design systems support, ranging from Davy's fave, Office Hours, to async support on Slack. A good episode candidate to do design systems bingo/drinking game.
Episode Transcripts
Aug 18, 202227:60

Ep 14: File Hygiene
Ep 14: File Hygiene
PJ grills Davy about his super organized and sometimes outrageous file hygiene mandates he lead while working at Disney Streaming. How can you use organization and naming to drive better alignment across design and engineering partners?
Episode Transcripts
Aug 06, 202229:51

Ep 13: Feedback
Ep 13: Feedback
Davy and PJ talk about how we've incorporated design and engineering user feedback on our design system work. Leaning into surveys, PJ has had great success half-over-half by employing a new product framework.. listening.
Episode Transcripts
Jul 18, 202233:50

Ep 12: Speaking
Ep 12: Speaking
Davy talks about speaking at his first design conference last month, UXDX. We talk about how to find your voice and how to get started for those whom want to engage more with the product design community.
Episode Transcripts
Jun 29, 202231:34

Ep 11: Adoption
Ep 11: Adoption
We took a long Memorial Day vacay and back to talk about adoption methods and get how to get designers excited to use your design system. Chatter about how different strategies apply for differing scale of teams.
Episode Transcripts
Jun 07, 202230:20

Ep 10: Hindsight, What We Wish We've Known...
Ep 10: Hindsight, What We Wish We've Known...
Happy 10th episode birthday! We wanted to take a look at and see, knowing what we've known about working on design systems at our companies, what we wish we would have known had we started today.
Episode Transcripts
May 23, 202227:13

Ep 9: ROI
Ep 9: ROI
We're almost at episode 10, and we're here to talk about ROI, driving impact. It has to do with learning what leadership's LOVE LANGUAGE is.
Episode Transcripts
May 13, 202233:20

Ep 8: Multi-brand Design Systems
Ep 8: Multi-brand Design Systems
We talk about a fun topic of scale, how to support multiple brands under 1 design system. Davy talks a bit about considerations when designing across Disney+ and Star+ and the usage of theming to design for one system in whole.
Episode Transcripts
Apr 27, 202233:16

Ep 7: JIRA MORMONT
Ep 7: JIRA MORMONT
We've polled our listeners and heard that JIRA was their favorite design tool, over Figma. So we decided to talk about how we've utilized JIRA as Design System product owners and how it's impacted the way we plan our work.
Episode Transcriptions
Apr 14, 202235:27

Ep 6: Mandates
Ep 6: Mandates
Mandates, governance, we discuss how our orgs approach the mandates for usage of the Design Systems.
Episode Transcripts
Mar 29, 202227:41

Ep 5: Figma is NOT a Design System
Ep 5: Figma is NOT a Design System
Is your work in Figma a Design System? We chat about how design artifacts and tools are just one portion of what a system represents.
Episode Transcripts
Mar 16, 202232:36

Ep 4: Documentation
Ep 4: Documentation
One of the favorite talking points of all Design System folx, Documentation. What does documentation mean to you?
Episode Transcripts
Mar 01, 202232:39

Ep 3: Releases and Versioning
Ep 3: Releases and Versioning
An meta-pilot on releasing the podcast on a Wednesday vs a Friday. We talk about how we manage Design System releases as well as the differences between versioning and version control.
Episode Transcripts
Feb 16, 202233:08

Ep 2: Design Technologists
Ep 2: Design Technologists
Welcome to our second episode! We have Ayesha Mazrana (@AyeshaKMaz) a Design Technologist at Pinterest, talking about her role, how she works with design and engineering, and how she's found success working on a Design Systems team with PJ.
Episode Transcripts
Feb 03, 202230:49

Ep 1: Design Management for Design Systems
Ep 1: Design Management for Design Systems
Welcome to our first episode. Davy and PJ talk about who they are, and dive into their roles as Design Managers, managing Design Systems for 2 different organizations.
Episode Transcripts
Jan 21, 202234:47

Ep 0: Design System Office Hours Intro
Ep 0: Design System Office Hours Intro
Design System Office Hours trailer. No spoilers!
Jan 17, 202200:30