My friend and frequent collaborator Dan Mall wrote up a fantastic post about a crucial part of creating design systems: pilot projects.
PILOTS ARE ONE OF the best ways to put your design system through its paces, especially before the design system even gets to a v1. Like television pilots help test audience reactions to a series concept without investing significant resources to create the whole thing, application pilots are a good foundation for ensuring your design system’s design and code are battle-tested.
Dan walks through some of the criteria for choosing successful pilot projects, and identifies the sweet spot in the process that allows the pilot to both benefit from and contribute to an emerging design system.