When I led Tessel at Northbeam, teams sometimes asked the system to solve problems it never could. A component library cannot tell you whether a feature should exist.

Consistency is not clarity

You can build a perfectly consistent product that nobody understands. The system makes the right thing easy to build; it cannot make the wrong thing right.

What it can do

• Free designers from re-solving solved problems.

• Make accessibility the default instead of the exception.

• Give teams a shared vocabulary for disagreement.

Treat your system as infrastructure for good decisions, not a replacement for them, and it will repay you every week.