Playbook · Day 1 → Day 90
Build a design system
in ninety days.
Eight chapters, four phases, one arc, with links to the canonical systems at every step.
Orient
Build the spine
Compose and ship
Operate
Orient
Build the spine
Compose and ship
Operate
90 days · 8 chapters · 4 phases
If a phase passes without producing its artifact, you’re behind — pause and recover before moving on.
Phase 01 · Days 1–7 · Week 1
Decide before you build.
Decide whether to build the system at all. Run the math. Get the funding conversation right before any artifact ships.
Phase 02 · Days 8–30 · Weeks 2–4
Three weeks, three artifacts.
Foundations first (color, type, spacing), then tokens (not raw values), then the right ten components. One artifact ships at the end of each week.
Phase 03 · Days 31–60 · Weeks 5–8
Stop building. Start shipping.
Primitives are done. Document the ten patterns specific to your product, get a distribution mechanism (npm or registry) wired up, and start the adoption funnel.
Phase 04 · Days 61–90 · Weeks 9–13
Launched is not sustained.
Governance: who decides, who deprecates, who reviews. Measurement: what proves the investment was worth it.
If you only have
Pick the budget you actually have.
A defensible answer to “should we build one?”
Chapter 01 plus the ROI calculator. Forty-five minutes of reading, fifteen minutes of inputs. You leave with a number you can defend to your director and a written threshold for “not yet.”
A written foundations brief.
Chapters 01–02 plus the foundations index. By end of day you have a one-page foundations document — color decision, type scale, spacing baseline — that the rest of the system reasons against.
A token catalog and a component list.
Days 1–30: chapters 01–04 plus the token generator. Outputs: a portable token catalog (W3C-format export), a draft list of the ten components you’ll build first, and a deprecation policy for anything you replace.
Day 1. Chapter 01. Forty-five minutes.
Framework choice can wait. Chapter 01 settles whether you should build at all, and gives you the numbers to back it.