Hey friend,

This is Design Current. A newsletter about user experience design.

It's the time of the year again.

Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year… but also 2026 planning season.

Yep, the time when everyone’s scrambling for a spot on the roadmap, arguing for headcount, trying to prove why their priorities matter most.

And if you’re like most designers I’ve talked to lately, one theme keeps coming up:

But here’s the tricky part: how do you actually sell that?

Don't lead with consistency

The first time we worked on a design system, we asked product teams to swap out old screens with new components, because our UI lacks consistency.

Their response was basically: “Why would we spend time on that instead of building new features?”

To them, “consistency” wasn’t more valuable than shipping new features.

So what did we do instead?

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1. Tell a story about wasted money, in actual numbers

Instead of talking about quality or consistency, we talked about waste.

We pulled real numbers: hours wasted and dollars lost.

If every component requires similar effort, and your product needs around 80 core components, then:

In short:

A missing design system doesn’t just slow teams down, it was quietly burning over $150K in duplicated work on basic UI alone.

When we brought that to leadership, the conversation flipped from “Do we need to invest in design system?” to “Why haven’t we already fixed this?”

2. Tell a story about ➡️ critical infrastructure ⬅️

We realized that when we called it a “component library” or “shared components,” people treated it like a nice-to-have.

So we stopped using that language.

Instead, we started calling it critical infrastructure. Suddenly, not investing in it sounded reckless.

And once the framing shifted, it became easy to tell the real story:

Without this foundation, our team moves slower. Our product is built on shaky ground. Our competitors ship faster, because they aren’t busy reinventing the same UI pieces over and over.

3. Tell a story about low hanging fruits for user satisfaction

We positioned design system work as the fastest way to improve the user experience.

Sure, tiny inconsistencies like button spacing or slightly different field styles may seem superficial. But users feel these things. They might not be able to explain why something feels clunky or unpolished, but they react to it.So instead of pitching design system work as cleanup, we framed it as the easiest path to happier users.

• If your product goal is trust, then consistency builds it. Inconsistency chips away at it.
• If your goal is ease of use, then repetition and familiarity lower cognitive load.

You don’t always improve retention or engagement by launching new features. Sometimes, the real win comes from removing the little bits of friction that users trip over every day.

Anyi & Andrea

Cofounders @ Koi Studios​

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