Launching facilitating the adoption of a new design is hard – it’s even harder at the scale of Facebook Ads and Business products on top of a famous “bottoms up culture”. Building a design system takes equal parts craft, collaboration, salesmanship, and determination. Learn how we got our new design language off the ground, what strategies we used to get buy-in from teams, how we validated and propagated it, and how we adapted to speed bumps and curveballs along the way to a successful launch in unpredictable times.

1. How We Designed It
Facebook Business Design System
Ken Skistimas
Product Design Manager
Priyanka Godbole
Product Design Lead
Madison Hines
Design Program Manager

2. Ken Skistimas
Product Design Manager
Setting the Vision

7. Over 200 explorations

9. Industry Audit

12. Priyanka Godbole
Product Design Lead
Building Momentum

13. A design system needs a pilot product to
establish itself.

17. Validating Concepts

21. Path to success is not linear.

23. Continued momentum through
partnership support models

24. Shipping at Scale
Madison Hines
Design Program Manager

25. Design
Program
Manager
Design System Product Teams

26. “This is the most ambitious redesign
we have taken on for our business
interfaces, but it will be worth it.”
- Facebook Ads & Business VP

27. Carrots and Sticks
Timeframe Carrots 🥕 Sticks 🏏
Now ● Recognition
● New pattern development
● Eng performance/stability
● Code errors and warnings
● Tracking updates
● Leadership review
Checkpoint ● Compliance score
● Eng contractor support
● Escalation review
● Test removal from global nav
Launch ● 1:1 design and eng support ● Remove product from global nav
● Block code from shipping

28. High touch and public recognition

29. Code Complete In Production No Plans to Ship

30. Enablement > Enforcement

31. Takeaways

32. Socialize early & often.

33. It takes a village.

34. Don’t boil the ocean.

35. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

36. https://medium.com/facebook-design-business-tools
Facebook Design : Business Tools

37. Thank You : )
Q&A
Ken Skistimas
/in/kskistimas
Priyanka Godbole
/in/priyankacgodbole
Madison Hines
/in/madison-hines/