![]() ![]() Spotify really needed a useful, unified design system-but we knew that a centralized team like GLUE probably wouldn’t work. Can you imagine being a new designer or engineer and asking, “Hey, do we have a design system?” and the answer is, “Yeah, we actually have 22”? Pretty confusing. At one point, we counted 22 different design systems floating around. But this extremely decentralized, “everyone make your own” approach wasn’t sustainable. We wanted to make it possible for listeners to access Spotify anywhere.Ī lot of great work went into these ground-up efforts, and we’re still using parts of these systems today. This was in part due to a new company strategy: ubiquity. Now we were also designing for cars, smartwatches, speakers, and even smart fridges. The days of designing for mobile and desktop were long gone. In 2018, Spotify continued to grow, and fast. After a while, we saw that having a centralized design systems team didn’t fit with this way of working. Spotify values “aligned autonomy” and empowers teams (squads) to make their own decisions. Why? It comes down to how the organization is set up. This was great for consistency, and many companies find that a centralized team works for them. The team refreshed Spotify’s look and feel, standardized many of our components across mobile and desktop, and grew from a handful of people to 30+ full-time engineers and designers.īut there was a catch: GLUE was a single, centralized team. ![]() The GLUE design system was a success in lots of ways.
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