DSM is a platform that makes the creation, distribution, governance, and use of a design system seamless and efficient.
I led Design for DSM, establishing the product experience vision and directing a fully distributed design team who executed a complete revamp of the product based on evolving customer needs. My work also extended beyond just design leadership as I made significant contributions to the overall product strategy.
My work with DSM allowed me to learn from hundreds of design system makers and users. I became deeply knowledgeable about the ways design system teams work and best practices around scaling and maturing design systems.
When I joined InVision in 2018, InVision DSM was a new product for the organization, originating from a startup acquisition. Product market fit had not been fully established, but there was a huge opportunity for design systems solutions to become an integral part of the InVision product offering.
Unlike other design tools, design systems tools are relatively nascent and limited, though they are quickly evolving as companies race to meet the demands of design system teams. Defining the InVision DSM experience, therefore, was more of an exercise in creating a net new product ecosystem vs. building upon existing market solutions.
In order to guide the direction of the product, I first looked to understand our customers’ needs and the opportunity space as deeply as possible:
This resulted in distinguishing between the needs and goals of design system makers, or those who create and maintain the system, and design system users, or those who consume the system to work on products.
I also created a detailed journey map that outlines design system maker, designer, and developer tasks that happen during major phases of design system usage and governance. This highlighted painpoints, manual work, and other inefficiencies that could be potentially served by better design system tooling.
Why is this journey map powerful? The value that this map brings isn’t limited to helping identify better tooling opportunities. It can also easily be adopted by design system teams looking to capture their current state workflows, document their own painpoints, and create a vision for future state ideal workflows. It becomes a “playbook” for how cross-functional teams should interact with an organization’s design system.
Not only was understanding the most impactful product opportunities important for our Product team, it was equally critical that we aligned with InVision’s executive leadership to best position DSM as a part of the broader InVision ecosystem.
I created multiple communication frameworks that explained key aspects of DSM’s strategy to stakeholders across the organization, making it more approachable to those with less in-depth knowledge of the space.
This included:
These frameworks, along with frequent alignment sessions with executives, allowed us to get buy-in for executing our strategy and investing in DSM as a core part of the InVision platform.
Prior to planning or defining the features that would tactically help us deliver an experience based on our product strategy, it was important to first articulate a vision — an ideal future state of the product in order to inspire and align the organization. The design vision would serve as the North Star for product decision making.
As part of the vision process, I:
Coming out of this vision exercise, we determined that a substantial pivot in the product experience was necessary to meet user needs. DSM originally required design teams to define and use design system styles and components through a DSM Sketch plugin. As Sketch’s native solution for managing design libraries matured, however, it became clear though customer feedback that DSM needed to shift to augment the Sketch Libraries experience rather than compete with it.
This shift impacted almost every aspect of the DSM product. Along with my Product and Engineering peers, I helped break down vision into phased product initiatives and requirements that would allow us to deliver a “minimum valuable product” that leveraged the new experience model.
This experience then evolved over time through a series of alpha and beta programs that allowed us to quickly react to user feedback prior to a broader launch.
I was responsible for overseeing design and managing the design team working on the product’s entire ecosystem:
Each of these product pieces had to be optimized for its context but also designed to ensure a cohesive end-to-end experience.
The New DSM product launch resulted in meeting or exceeding our target metrics, including but not limited to:
