Many teams struggle with the creation and adoption of processes to enhance collaboration and this often leads to unclear direction, involving key stakeholders too late in a project, as well as design and tech debt. This talk will discuss these challenges and others that the audience might relate to, as well as present steps to help audience members diagnose these issues and identify ways to improve team processes. Design systems can solve many problems and can take on many shapes and forms. If implemented in the software development process, a system can solve tech related issues such as, tech debt & developer experience, process related issues such as, design hand-offs, cross-functional communication. In an ideal world, a design system team can solve it all. Although there is no single solution that can describe how to perfectly design or implement a design system, the talk will provide ideas and guidelines on how to identify and approach these issues. The actual implementation depends on the company itself (culture, size, stakeholders, particular issue at hand, UX and company maturity, etc.). The goal is for the audience to walk away with several takeaways that can be incorporated into team processes and workflows. Those takeaways are: Understanding the maturity stage of the UX team and of the Design System (whether current or future) as well as what that means in terms of how to approach the problem we are trying to solve Allowing a Design System to support the full design process (pre-ideation, ideation, planning, building & post build) Difference between internal and external Design Systems – team alignment, one voice Understanding your stakeholders – who to involve and when to involve them Becoming better at collaborating with Devs – design handoffs and developers experience (DX) Addressing tech debt and design debt; partnering with software architects to solve such issues Applying UX practices to measure internal success and adoption Creating measurable success criteria