Retrospective on building a design system with open source without a platform team

Inflab is an organization of 10 frontend developers and 5 designers, and for the past 2 years it has been operating an open source-based design system to boost productivity without a separate platform team.

Previously, multiple versions of the design system coexisted, making it difficult to check components and incurring communication costs between designers and developers, causing productivity problems. To solve this, instead of building from scratch, they chose a strategy of leveraging proven open source UI to reduce documentation costs and focus on business logic and UX.

During the build process, there was conflict as the design side prioritized the richness of Figma assets while the frontend side prioritized the freedom of customization, but they narrowed the gap by understanding each other's way of working (e.g., the effort required to create Figma assets depending on component options).