The hard truth about enterprise design systems

Why DIY systems fail, and what to do instead

By Jesse Anton, CEO & Co-Founder of Whitespace

Date: 31 October 2025

When enterprise IT teams try to move faster, one of the first ideas on the table is a design system.

It makes sense — consistency, reuse, and fewer repetitive design decisions. But too often, these systems start strong and then quietly collapse under their own weight.

We’ve seen it happen in enterprises across various industries: well-intentioned, home-grown systems that accumulate design and technical debt. Here’s why — and what to do instead.

The DIY trap

The scene:
A large traditional enterprise with ambitious AI-driven productivity goals bumping up against a culture that's anything but digital-native.

The plot tension:
Leadership wants to move fast and impress the Board with shiny AI objects while simultaneously cutting costs. A design system would help. But there's no design system. Or there was one, but nobody knows where it is anymore because the team that built it left to join Google. Or there are several design systems ... but it turns out they are essentially useless and gathering dust. Who will save the day?

The protagonists:
A dashing designer and daring developer come together to start a fresh new DIY design system project. It starts small. A Figma library. A few color tokens. Some code snippets. A bit of documentation in Confluence.

The build-up:
For a while, things are good. The system grows. Everyone feels aligned. Our protagonists feel like heroes. Will they live happily ever after?

The plot twist:
A blue-chip management consultancy is hired and begins working on top-secret 'disruptive' PowerPoint slides in a dark corner of the building. They have the ear of the executive committee. Nobody knows for sure, but they might be recycling last week's work for another client and using AI to 'adjust the tone and context'. A new CTO (formerly with the management consultancy) parachutes in and announces a comprehensive refactoring and overhaul of the tech stack.

The dénouement:
Cracks begin to appear in the now-doomed system, including duplicated components, mismatched patterns, and missing documentation. The users start complaining and demanding retribution. The system becomes harder to maintain — and the promise of speed turns into a drag on momentum. Funding is lost. The system is jettisoned.

The anti-climax:
Our heroes apply for jobs at Uber. The management consultancy moves on to the next victim client. The curtain falls.

The moral:
Most design systems don’t fail because they’re bad ideas. They fail because they don't have the right conditions in which to thrive.

Why failure happens

Internal design systems lack the necessary structure, skill, and stakeholder commitment to succeed. This is not a reflection on the latent talent within the organization. It is the result of how the organization operates. It's cultural.

Common patterns we see:

No governance: departmental resources 'on loan' are not centrally accountable
No in-house expertise: designers lack solid Figma chops; development is outsourced
No design-to-code parity: what’s in Figma doesn’t match what's in code
No flexibility: product teams lack the freedom to use different JS frameworks
No data: metrics and KPIs are not available
No storytelling: the ROI is not clear to stakeholders
No funding: if nobody 'owns' it, the product dies on the vine

Without clarity and care, even the best systems turn messy. And the costs start to compound.

Fragility
Multiple Figma files, naming conflicts, spacing inconsistencies — it all adds up when there is no process to govern the product. Every change becomes harder to trace, and risks begin to accumulate. Design debt is just as real and problematic as technical debt.
Stagnation
The irony of a DIY design system: it’s meant to make things faster but ends up slowing everyone down. Developers stop trusting components. Designers rebuild patterns that already exist. The system becomes a velocity tax on every sprint.
Burnout
Maintaining a fragile system is draining. Designers can’t keep up with documentation. Developers lose faith in the library. Onboarding takes longer. Morale dips. Funding disappears.
Inefficiency
The biggest cost? What never gets built. Every dollar spent maintaining an unscalable system is a dollar not spent improving the actual products and business tools that the system is meant to support.

The problem is worse than it appears

We observe that most of our enterprise customers are being taken advantage of by their so-called 'strategic' development partners (big-box offshore IT services companies), who happily reinvent the wheel each time they assign a development team to build a new bespoke solution for the client.

Often, these partners are unaware that a design system even exists within enterprise accounts, let alone where to find a basic pattern library or brand guidelines document. They start from scratch, using off-the-shelf libraries like MUI and 'bending and twisting' them to match the client's brand identity. The same UI components are created repeatedly because every product is essentially treated as a separate 'project' that is built in silos by separate 'teams' — not 'empowered teams' in the SVPG sense, but rather more like 'mercenaries'.

It's not entirely the partners' fault. We also observe that most of our clients struggle to establish an in-house design system that is adequately staffed, properly architected, and sufficiently evangelized. Design system resources are 'borrowed' from other departments and disappear when politics intervene and power centers shift. Initiatives are often launched but fail to deliver before leadership priorities change, funding is cut, or a reorg wreaks havoc. The momentum dies, and so does the design system.

At least for a while. Different parts of the company eventually spin up competing systems, 'skunk works' style. There is a 'Wild West', shadow-IT mindset that pervades the product culture.

In the best-case scenarios, the design systems that do cross the chasm in enterprise environments are often challenging for both designers and developers to consume. As a result, adoption never reaches critical mass.

What good systems need

A scalable design system isn’t just a Figma library or a code repo — it’s a fully-fledged product.

It needs:

1-1 mapping between design components and coded components
Shared tokens and naming conventions
Clear, easy-to-maintain documentation
Flexibility for contribution and change
Tooling that fits into real workflows
Accessibility and security by default
Semantic structure and MCP-powered context for AI

Above all, it needs trust. And trust has to be earned. This doesn't happen overnight, which is why committed stakeholders and sufficient long-term funding are required to bridge the gap until trust can be established and ROI proved.

What you can do about this

Which brings us back to the original dilemma. The conditions for design system success rarely exist within a large enterprise. Digital-native companies can make design systems work, but even for them, it's a significant challenge. Outside of the tech industry, the rest of the world is still struggling to cross the chasm.

So what should enterprise technology leaders do? We believe we have the answer.

Consider your design system a product that you buy, not one that you build. It's ironic to say that, because a design system exists so that you can build products.

At Whitespace, we have developed an Agentic Design System platform called Edelweiss that enables any customer to leverage it in ‘plug and play’ mode to build software applications. It can be up and running (fully branded, fully accessible) in a matter of days. Additional customizations (e.g., marketing templates) are available as part of a value-added service.

Having built numerous design systems in the past for various organizations, we realized we could create one that is flexible, customizable, and future-proof enough to suit the needs of most enterprise clients. Our mission is to bring the full value of design systems to customers, without the associated hassle and headaches that a DIY approach entails.

Part product, part service, Edelweiss is a turnkey 'UI infrastructure' solution for your enterprise AI architecture. Teams building software products on top of LLMs, data lakes, etc. — all that investment in AI-driven product development that large enterprises will be making over the next decade — now have an AI-ready UI layer to tap into, meaning product builds become much more efficient, consistent, and accessible.

As the only solution on the market backed by an SLA, Edelweiss comes with dedicated customer success and support services that guarantee rapid returns and long-term value. Right out of the gate, you no longer need to spin up an in-house design system team, which means your designers and developers can stay focused on solving business problems, not reinventing the button.

Set yourself up for success

AI is changing how software is designed and developed.

While vibe coding solutions, such as Lovable and V0, are interesting for ideation and rapid prototyping, they have no place in an enterprise's production software infrastructure.

Agentic coding assistants like Claude Code or GitHub Copilot, however, are an entirely different story. They have real utility in your SDLC, provided they are given the proper context and guardrails in which to operate.

Edelweiss is the missing UI piece of the new agentic coding paradigm.

Our design token structure is semantic, and our documentation (in Figma, Storybook, JSDoc, Starlight, etc.) is complete and precise. Additionally, our design and coded components are mapped one-to-one (with zero gaps). What's in Figma matches what's in code. We supply libraries for both React and Web Components.

Agents can invoke Edelweiss via MCP (Model Context Protocol). Our built-in MCP Server enables you to ‘tame’ agentic coding assistants, ensuring they only use the coded components from the design system library. Effectively, agents will no longer pull from code found in the wild and hope for the best … meaning you get a far more deterministic output.

Designers can design screen flows using the Edelweiss Figma component library, and MCP will provide context (design intent) for the coding assistant to assemble front-end code from the 1-1 mapped coded components. This is the closest thing we've seen to ‘designing with code’.

Front-end developers can spend more time on backend integration tasks (hooking up to Graph or REST endpoints) and less time on interpreting 'fuzzy' design directions. Design-to-code workflows are dramatically streamlined. With the advent of 'spec-driven development' (see Amazon Kiro, for example), this agentic SDLC approach is expected to gain popularity and precision, and the value proposition of Edelweiss will only increase.

More bang for your buck

Code reuse is a big deal. We expect Edelweiss to save enterprise clients millions every year, not only on in-house design system team costs, but also on product development costs. Procurement can use it as leverage to renegotiate contracts with the 'strategic' development partners mentioned above. Product managers and product designers can put working prototypes in front of business stakeholders more quickly and frequently. Time to delivery will accelerate in both agentic and traditional coding environments, while improving consistency, quality, and accessibility. It's a significant ROI. What are you waiting for?

You can learn more at Edelweiss.dev (site launching 1H 2026). In the meantime, if you are interested in becoming an early adopter, get in touch with us to arrange a demo.