As I’ve been working on a big refactor lately I realized what all systems should be! It is obvious now but a big revelation for me and how I think about design systems! Sorry!
One thing that drives me *bonkers* about tech culture is teaching designers that the bureaucracy is more important than the output — journey maps, documentation, multiple iterations, user research etc etc. All of these are fine tools but the goal is a good product and you can spend months producing mountains of all these design artifacts and *still* end up with junk.
Every problem at every company I’ve ever worked at eventually boils down to “please dear god can we just hire people who know how to write HTML and CSS”