Product
7 min read
Design systems for companies of eleven people
You do not need a hundred components. You need twelve that nobody is tempted to override, and a naming convention your next hire can guess.
Twelve is usually enough
Button, input, card, tag, avatar, modal, table row, nav item, tab, tooltip, empty state, toast. A small team will use these every day and almost nothing else. Everything beyond the twelve should have to justify its existence.
Tokens before components
If colour and spacing are named, a component can be rebuilt in an afternoon. If they are not, every component quietly hard-codes a slightly different grey, and the system becomes a museum of near-misses.
An override is a bug report
When somebody detaches a component, they are telling you the component was missing a variant. Treat it as feedback rather than as a violation, and the system stays used instead of becoming something people route around.