The failed ComponentScript framework insisted on using GraphQL for data consistency, adding significant friction. A competing server-driven UI approach succeeded by sacrificing consistency, which 80% of products didn't need. Prioritizing technical ideals over pragmatic user needs can be fatal.

The idea that design systems stifle creativity stems from the high cost of re-coding components after a design change. In a world with a single source of truth, where design changes automatically update the code, this cost disappears, allowing systems to be radically changed without engineering overhead.

Stripe's design philosophy is influenced by co-founder Patrick Collison's question about what modernism lost. The team actively counters clean, sterile design by adding small, humane details and moments of magic, believing product experiences have become too disconnected and lacking in humanity.

While brand consistency is a benefit, the primary business impact of a well-built design system is operational efficiency. It drastically accelerates speed to market for new features and slashes onboarding time for new hires because the system's intelligence is effectively self-documenting.

Technical tools are secondary to building a successful design system. The primary barrier is a lack of shared vision. Success requires designers to think about engineering constraints and engineers to understand UX intent, creating an empathetic, symbiotic relationship that underpins the entire system.

Instead of building UI elements from scratch, adopt modern libraries like Tailwind's Catalyst or Shad CN. They provide pre-built, accessible components, allowing founders to focus engineering efforts on unique features rather than reinventing solved problems like keyboard navigation in dropdowns.

For highly commoditized interactions like text editor undo or canvas pinch-to-zoom, users have powerful, ingrained expectations. Failing to match these conventions doesn't make a tool feel "different"; it makes it feel fundamentally unusable and broken, regardless of its other features. Innovation should be focused elsewhere.

Many design systems are built as simple digital extensions of brand guidelines, where digital rules are an afterthought. This flawed foundation prevents scalability, focusing only on superficial elements like fonts and colors without planning for future growth and complexity.

The founders avoid creating a rigid, atomized design system because the product is still iterating too quickly. They accept a "messy" component library and technical debt as a trade-off for speed. Formalizing a design system only makes sense once the product's UI has stabilized.