Do you need a system?

Across the tech industry, teams are being asked to move faster with fewer people. The word lean has quietly turned into less. Systems work is often one of the first things to go. On paper, removing structure looks efficient. In practice, it usually erodes the foundations that make efficient work possible. Ironic.

Artificial intelligence is making this tension sharper. As tools begin to design, code, and ship faster than ever, systems help teams remember what fast work forgets. Without solid shared foundations and documentation, AI will only accelerate the chaos, producing more but meaning less.

Good systems slow you down in the right places so everything else can move smoothly. Josh Clark describes this clearly in his article Ship faster by building design systems slower.

Successful design systems move more slowly than the products they support. That’s a feature, not a bug.

Josh Clark Principal, Big Medium

The Linear example

When a short video titled “Why Linear didn’t build a design system” started circulating, it sparked some juicy debate. Some used it as proof that systems were unnecessary, but if you listen closely to the three-minute video, you hear something else:

Linear did have a system, a lightweight, internal one. It lived inside shared Figma libraries and code, consistent habits, and a tight culture of trust. For a small, highly skilled team working side by side, that was enough. Their coherence came from proximity and shared taste, not documentation.

The lesson isn’t that systems slow teams down. It’s that every team already has one, whether they call it that or not. The question is whether it’s intentional, maintained, and able to grow as the team grows.

Understanding context

Two factors define when and how much structure a team needs: size and maturity. But before either of those, it’s worth remembering what the system exists for. A system is never the goal. The goal is the experience: how it feels, how the brand comes through, and how clearly it helps people do what they came to do. Systems exist to serve that clarity, not to replace it.

A healthy system amplifies that intent. It connects design, code, and content so that everything reflects the same care. When the system becomes an end in itself, it risks drifting away from the people it was meant to serve.

Team size

Small teams can stay consistent through conversation. Alignment happens in real time. As teams grow, that implicit coordination fades. Variations multiply. Each new hire adds diversity and distance. Systems become the glue that conversation used to provide.

Team maturity

Maturity isn’t about seniority or years of experience. It’s about awareness, the ability to see how individual work affects the whole. Some people think in systems naturally. Others learn over time. The danger comes when confidence grows faster than capability. That’s when incoherence spreads, often confused as “creative freedom.”

The role of leadership

Leadership plays a crucial role here. Good leaders see maturity as a shared practice, not an individual trait. They connect teams around a common standard, help people understand why that standard exists, and create space to challenge it safely. They don’t impose rules; they nurture perspective.

In teams that understand systems, structure is seen as collaboration, not control.

Mature leadership recognises that clarity creates autonomy. When people know the rules, they can bend them responsibly.

The system need and impact on experience

Every team reaches a moment when scattered effort starts to slow progress. The question isn’t whether to build a system, but how much structure your current reality calls for.

A visual model showing how system need changes with team size and maturity. Small, mature teams often stay coherent with minimal structure. Large, less mature teams face higher risk of inconsistency and inefficiency.

Let’s break it down:

Large team, low maturity: Critical need. Quality and consistency collapse. Systems become essential for survival.
Small team, still learning: Moderate need. Talent is there, but shared habits aren’t. Systems help the team align and grow.
Larger team, capable but fragmented: Moderate need. Work looks strong in isolation but feels disconnected together. Systems reconnect intent and delivery.
Small, experienced team: Minimal need. Shared understanding replaces formal process. A light system keeps things coherent.

Some people assume that the maturity of the product should determine when a system is needed. That assumption can hold teams back. Systems don’t need to come after maturity; they can help create it. The right level of structure at the right moment supports experimentation instead of constraining it, making work faster and more deliberate even in early stages.

Any startup that I’ve worked on, that’s always the first thing that I’ve built because it lets me go fast.

Henry Modisett VP of Design at Perplexity

The goal isn’t to reach “minimal.” It’s to understand where you are and to let the system grow at the pace your reality demands.

Assessing maturity

You can often feel the cracks before you see them. Listen for the signs:

Work gets duplicated.
Teams rebuild the same components differently.
Interfaces feel slightly off, even if you can’t say why.
Decisions depend on who’s in the room, not on shared principles.
Documentation is outdated or ignored.
The systems team becomes the scapegoat for moving “too slowly.”

When that happens, the problem isn’t efficiency, it’s understanding. Systems exist to turn coordination into clarity. Without them, coordination takes over creation.

Leaders can respond in two ways. They can blame the system for being slow, or they can help the team mature into using it. Pair people across disciplines. Reward those who collaborate and teach. Create time to explain the why behind every decision.

System literacy must be part of the job description for everyone in brand, design, content, engineering, and product. Career paths should reflect that. As AI takes on more of the work, systems and documentation become the bridge between human intent and machine output. Without them, we’ll keep repeating the same mistakes, only faster.

The right structure doesn’t just shape the product; it shapes the team. Work becomes clearer, collaboration smoother, and progress more consistent. This shared foundation creates understanding and long-term value, a compounding benefit that many teams underestimate.

The cost of denial

When organizations neglect their systems, the decline rarely looks dramatic at first. At the beginning, it can feel liberating: fewer steps, faster delivery, less coordination. But over time, duplication grows, quality drops, and the same decisions get made and remade in different places. The short-term gain turns into a long-term cost.

Mark Dalgleish captured this tension well:

Design systems are such a battle.
A battle against old ways of thinking.
A battle against old ways of working.
A battle against history.
A battle against inertia.
Still, we need to stop and appreciate just how far we’ve come. It’s actually quite remarkable.

Mark Dalgleish Staff Engineer at Shopify

Keeping a system alive is not about adding new components or documentation. It’s about maintenance, refactoring, and improving the foundations that carry the most weight. That quiet work is easy to overlook until it’s gone.

Good systems are patient. They move slowly so everything else can move safely. They preserve what rushed teams tend to lose.

Reflection

A system is any shared framework that helps people create coherent experiences together. That can mean language, workflows, principles, or tools. Whatever keeps intent aligned across disciplines, because the goal is always the experience. The system exists to help teams deliver it more coherently, across products, platforms, and time. When a system becomes the goal itself, it stops serving its purpose.

As AI accelerates work, systems become how we keep meaning intact. They teach both humans and machines what coherence looks like. Progress isn’t about moving faster but about moving meaningfully. A reminder to slow down to speed up.

The idea was to bring together a group of remarkable people to see if they could become something more. To see if they could work together when we needed them to, to fight the battles that we never could.

Nick Fury Director of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Systems don’t stay healthy on intent alone. They need people who care enough to keep them clear, documented, and shared. The role of leadership is not only to make room for that care but to make it matter. When leaders treat quality, accessibility, and coherence as priorities, the team learns to do the same. It takes courage to slow down when everything around you asks for speed. That courage is what real leadership looks like.