Five chapters on getting an existing product onto a design system without burning out the team or stalling product work. This is that track packaged to run in a room: the print PDF, the ten worksheets again as an editable workbook that ends in a Migration plan sheet, and the 90-minute agenda that runs them.
Read it free first
All five chapters are on the site in full. What the file adds is the print typesetting, the figures and the worksheets.
Designsystems.one · Playbook track
Getting an existing product onto a design system, in five chapters.
Counted, not rounded
41 pages, 11 figures, 10 worksheets, a 12-sheet workbook and a 90-minute agenda — from the files the build produces.
or write to kir.zhukovsky@gmail.com — subject prefilled
PDF · 41 pages · 10 worksheets · editable workbook · instant download · one-time purchase
No email, no form — the sample is a direct download.
Kiryl Zhukouskimaintainer of the Agent-Ready Index — 37 systems, audited quarterly.
The Migrate Playbook
or write to kir.zhukovsky@gmail.com — subject prefilled
01 · What you get
41 pages — The print PDF
Cover, contents, the migration arc, five chapters at seven pages each, a closing page and a colophon.
11 figures — Drawn for print
The arc band, the cost-score ranking, the token tiers, the four waves and seven more — every caption labelled illustrative.
10 worksheets — Ruled fields, printed A4
Two at the end of every chapter, and they chain: 1B feeds 2A, 3B feeds 3A, 2B is line one of 5B.
12 sheets — The worksheets again, editable
Dropdowns and a cost-score formula, a worked example of 1A, and a final Migration plan sheet.
90 minutes — The workshop agenda
Timeboxes, who is in the room, which sheet at which step. Done means every plan row has an owner and a date.
1 licence — Team-shareable
One purchase covers internal use across your company. Publishing it publicly, reselling and bundling are not covered.
02 · Look inside
Seven of them at reading size below — one of each kind of page. The rest are one click away.
Cover, contents, the migration arc, a chapter opener, a figure page, worksheet 1A and the closing page — A4 proportions, nothing cropped.
Page 5 · Chapter opener
Every chapter opens the same way: the number set large, the title, the tagline, a three-panel stat band, the intro paragraphs, one pull quote, and the four section headings you are about to read listed at the foot of the page. The stat panels here are labelled illustrative audit in the file itself — that label is printed, not added for this page.
What you are looking at
--chart-* tokens the figures on this page use.
Page 1
The cover
Title, the track tagline, and the five-colour band the chapter numbering uses throughout. Underneath: the five chapter titles, the counts, and a paragraph saying every chapter in the book is published free at designsystems.one/playbook/migrate.
Page 10
Worksheet 1A — Component inventory
Six columns, eighteen blank rows, one instruction line. Ruled and unshaded so it photocopies cleanly. This is the audit from chapter 01 turned into something you fill in with a pen.
03 · Free sample
Twelve pages, cut from the same PDF a buyer downloads — not a teaser rebuilt for the web. It ends with a page listing what the other four chapters cover.
Download the samplePDF · 12 pages · 1 MB · no email required
04 · Fit
You have a product in production
…and a design system only part of it uses. The migration is the work, not the building.
You need to defend the order
Sequencing the work is the argument. The arc and the cost score are how you win it.
You want it on paper, in a room
The audit and the wave planning run as a workshop, not as a doc nobody opens twice.
Three teams, three comparable answers
Hand the same worksheets to three teams and get back three things you can put side by side.
Skip it if
Both tracks, free: /playbook/migrate · /playbook
05 · Price · $49
The 41-page PDF, the 12-sheet workbook and the workshop agenda — the buy button appears here the day the checkout is live. Until then the whole text is free at /playbook/migrate — fine either way.
or write to kir.zhukovsky@gmail.com — subject prefilled
The web version stays free. All five chapters are readable in full at /playbook/migrate, before this PDF existed and after it. What $49 buys is the print typesetting, the worksheets, the editable workbook and the agenda that runs them.
The boring terms
Need the business case before the sequencing? The ROI Kit ($29) makes it in an editable spreadsheet.
06 · Details
The page-by-page ledger, the worksheets, one chapter worked end to end, and the questions people ask before buying.
What is on the pages, in the order they are bound.
The contents page lists every chapter, figure and worksheet with its page number. Page 3 is an introduction whose first line is that the web version is free. Page 4 is the whole migration arc as one proportional band.
Each chapter runs: an opener with the chapter's stat band and intro, two pages of prose across four sections, a full page of two figures, a takeaways page carrying the same 'use the system' references as the web chapter, and the chapter's two worksheets.
The arc band, a surface-area before/after, a cost-score ranking, the three-tier token diagram, the bridge lifecycle, the prioritisation matrix, the four waves, the rollback flow, the codemod split, the coverage burn-down, and per-product adoption. Every caption says the numbers are a worked example.
Two at the end of every chapter: the component inventory and token-collapse tables, the alias map and retirement contract, the wave planner and a blank matrix to plot into, the sweep runbook and escape-hatch register, the enforcement ladder and the cutover checklist.
Five phases, sized by their share of an illustrative twenty-eight week migration. Counting is cheap, componentising is where the months go, and the enforcement tail runs longer than anyone budgets for. The phases overlap in practice — they are drawn end to end because the dependencies are strictly ordered, not because the calendar is.
--red-600: #82182eRaw value, named after what it is — never after where it is used.
--color-dangerNames the intent. The bridge aliases legacy names onto this tier, never onto tier 1.
--button-danger-bgScoped to one component. Only worth introducing when a component genuinely deviates.
The bridge in chapter 02 aliases legacy names onto tier 2, never onto tier 1 — aliasing onto primitives freezes every intent-level change the migration exists to enable.
Two at the end of every chapter. They chain — 1B feeds 2A, 3B feeds 3A, 2B is line one of 5B — so filling them in order produces a migration plan. They ship twice: printable pages in the PDF, and the same ten as sheets in the workbook. The 90-minute agenda runs them in a room; done means the workbook's Migration plan sheet is filled.
| Component | Resolves to (path) | Variants | Instances | Owner | API compat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Four rows shown; the printed sheet has eighteen.
Eighteen blank rows on their own page, printed at A4 so it photocopies flat. Filling the ‘resolves to’ column is the whole point: the gap between what the import says and what actually renders is where the duplicate implementations hide.
The ten worksheets
Ruled fields, tables and checkboxes on their own pages so they photocopy cleanly — and one sheet each in the workbook, with dropdowns and formulas where the print version has checkboxes and a blank grid, a worked example of 1A filled with the book's illustrative audit, and the Migration plan sheet the workshop fills.
Why now
AI-assisted coding raised the stakes on drift: generated code copies whatever is already in the codebase, so every one-off button and unnamed hex value multiplies faster than a team can hand-review. The audit worksheets put a number on that drift; the chapters sequence the work of collapsing it.
On this site's ladder, this book is the $49 rung under the agent-ready line — agents inherit whatever consistency the migration leaves behind.
The sequence is the argument: audit before architecture, bridge before big-bang, primitives before composites, engineering path before enforcement, ceremony last. Each chapter is linked — verify before you buy.
Before you migrate anything, count what's there — and what's pretending to be one component but is actually six.
The intermediate layer that lets old and new ship side-by-side without breaking either.
The order matters — high-volume primitives unlock the rest, complex composites only matter once primitives are done.
Codemods, escape hatches, and the discipline that keeps the migration from blocking product work.
How you turn a migration that's 70% done into one that's 100% done — and stays that way.
Read any of them free
The PDF adds print typesetting, the figures and the worksheets. It does not add chapters.
“Audit the surface area” runs across pages 5 to 11 and has the same parts every chapter has: a stat band, four sections of argument, two figures, a takeaways page, and two worksheets. Here is the whole of it, so you know what the other four look like too. Read it in full, free, at /playbook/migrate/audit-the-surface-area.
1 · The stat band, page 5
6
Button implementations found where the team expected one
illustrative audit
~80
Distinct hex values, against an expected ~20
the usual gap
0
Lines of migration code written during the audit
counting is the work
These three panels are set at the top of the opener page, in these words. The first two are labelled illustrative in the file; the third is not a measurement of anything — it is the chapter's argument in one digit.
Before you migrate anything, count what's there — and what's pretending to be one component but is actually six.
The output is a flat spreadsheet, not a Figma file. Volume tells you sequence.
The pull quote is the one set on the opener page. The four headings are the same four the web chapter uses — the print edition adds paragraphs, not sections.
The takeaways as the shared source carries them. The book sets them on their own page at the end of the chapter, with the same two “use the system” references the web chapter carries: the token generator and the maturity model.
Illustrative. Most teams expect around twenty colours and find around eighty. Migrating before you have counted means writing a plan about a codebase nobody has measured — which is the plan you throw out three months in.
Illustrative. Complexity × instance count × API compatibility. Teams that start with the component that has been embarrassing them in production start at the bottom of this chart and spend their momentum before they have any.
6 · And then it chains
Worksheet 1B is the other half of the audit — the token collapse and the cost score. Every value you retire in 1B becomes an alias row in chapter 02's bridge worksheet, which is why the book tells you to keep it rather than transcribe it.
That is the shape of all five chapters: a stat band that frames the problem, four sections of argument, two figures drawn for print, a takeaways page, and two worksheets whose output the next chapter expects as input.
All five chapters are readable in full, for nothing, at /playbook/migrate. They were free before this PDF existed and they stay free after it — no teaser chapters, no gated sections, no expiry. What the $49 buys is format and convenience:
41 A4 pages with a running footer, real page numbers, and a contents page that points at them. Generated from the same source content as the site, so the shared text never drifts apart.
Ten printable pages of ruled tables, fields and checklists. The homework the web chapters describe, turned into something you can fill in with a pen and hand to whoever runs the audit.
The same ten worksheets as a 12-sheet editable workbook — dropdowns, a cost-score formula, a worked example of 1A, a final Migration plan sheet — and the 90-minute agenda that runs them: timeboxes, who is in the room, which sheet at which step. Done means every plan row has an owner and a date.
One purchase covers internal use across your company. Print it, photocopy the worksheets, put the file in the shared drive. Not licensed: publishing it publicly, reselling it, or bundling it into another paid product.