Design system community support model

Goal

To establish a way of working for the design system team that streamlines community support request and response model.

My role

Investigate the current-state situation to create a shared understanding of the current model
Present and educate a new way of working to help establish new behaviors
Create key artifacts that reduce inertia for adoption of key team behaviors
Incorporate team feedback over time

Project outcomes

Improve Quality

Improve the consistency and quality of responses from the design system team to all requests.

Increase scale

Create a scalable system that consolidates community requests and enables successful design system team responses.

Reduce noise

Relieve the team from many ad-hoc requests from the community.

Key steps

1 / Investigate current-state

Investigate and articulate the current-state situation to establish team awareness and alignment for where things are "now".

2 / Create proposal

Create a proposal plan for the system and draft supporting artifacts necessary for adoption, onboarding, and training.

3 / Onboarding

Onboard existing and new team members into the process. Included larger group session for existing members and additional one-on-ones for new members.

4 / Learn and refine

Gather feedback as the team adopts the approach and learns to adjust behavior to the process.

Additional context

The initial concept and minimum artifacts for this new community response model were created in a wee, with subsequent iteration over a many number of weeks. The team, for example, was able to identify opportunities to improve the request system over time. This resulted in evolving the process, and it's supporting artifacts, over time.