Taking stock of value-added, system health, product impact, and future opportunities are a regular practice for mature design systems (DS) programs. DS power comes in it’s ability to enable experience cohesion, stable resources, and repeatable scale. Hologram’s investment in the Dimension Design System has made significant strides in terms of creating a shared foundation for designers and engineers, curating time-saving resources, and laying the groundwork to help get us back to “growth”.

If the DS program thus far had an overall theme, it would be: flexible resilience

The mission from Hologram’s initial “aha!” moment about design systems has not changed, in that DS programs are implemented as a tool help product teams scale in a sustainable way. The charter of Dimension, however, has.

Dimension, formerly known as “NewSys,” was originally slated to be a “system of systems” to allow for reusability of styles and components across our current and future products, which accurately matched the overall Hologram charter in 2021. NewSys was meant to grow rapidly and begin to build and deliver tooling for the Dashboard and future-marketing-site ecosystems in parallel. As the re-platforming effort of the hologram.io site took shape, it was realized that the DS program could have a more immediate impact by ingesting the updated Hologram Brand and curating the next version of Dashboard’s visual style—and we were off to the races!

As things changed across the organization, plans for Dimension’s growth and scope needed to pivot to better meet Hologram’s current needs—enter: the “new house, same furniture” metaphor.

RIF pivot

To frame the current state and change in most-immediate needs after the RIF, we aligned around the concept of “new house, same furniture”:

*Right now, we’re at a decision point: we have a current house (Holokit/Stellar) and it’s been in the family for a few generations. Inside the house is a great set of furniture (UI components and styles) that has served our needs for the last several years.

But there have been some rusty pipes we haven’t had time to fix (a11y issues), and some mold we weren’t able to remove (3rd party dependencies).

A month ago, we were planning to move into a new house that was already being built (the Dimension repo & processes) and purchase all new furniture that has a new look and feel (new brand and product visual design exploration/vision).

As the new house finished completion we found we needed to move faster than originally planned and the new furniture was backordered with no known delivery date. After discussing with the family, we realized it would be faster to furnish the house with the furniture we already had from the old house.

Since the new house is done, and we can’t keep living in the old house, we’ve decided to move the furniture from the older-but-loved house to the new-and-efficient house because the furniture wasn’t the basis of our concerns. Sure, we’ll fix the broken bed, and fluff the pillows on the couch, but some furniture will only need minor improvements.*

With new goals written, tasks assigned, and discovery audits re-scoped, we got to work. We’d be remiss not to mentioned that the only way these changes could have been possible and not severely delay NewSys/Dimension’s ability to deliver is due to the strong working relationship of the DDS squad—having worked together via previous engagements, and an already-aligned methodology on how to do this work, has proved invaluable.

Hence, flexibly resilient.

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