Atomic Design

Tech companies are expected to move at an incredible pace, and building software is complex. Add ever growing and fluctuating teams to the mix and you often end up with disjointed experiences. This has led me to try to better understand how multiple teams can efficiently collaborate to build great, cohesive software. Design teams can often struggle to reach a cadence that balances the creative process and cycles of continuous innovation. Quality suffers, the experience becomes less cohesive, and talented people spend an inordinate amount of time simply managing communication across disciplines (should I tag a design friend here?). At my prior company Hilton, this process led our team to the development of a new design language system where we based all our design thinking decisions utilizing Brad Frost's Atomic Design Methodology. Their new design language system is a collection of Atoms, Molecules, Organisms, Templates, and Pages defined by shared principles and patterns for iOS, Android and Web. This allows for rapid iteration using a shared vocabulary for design, engineering, and other disciplines. The structure is simple and coherent and has helped ease communication across teams. Looking forward to sharing more in my portfolio in the future.

Meanwhile, can anyone relate to these design team struggles?

Other ideas to keep your design, dev, and product teams aligned with systematic design principles and patterns?

Has anyone gone from designing an entire mobile app product from OS Native to Hybrid to a Cross-Platform Custom approach?