In a fast-paced product development environment where users' needs constantly evolve, design is an area that is ever-changing. This means input on design decisions will continue to be required. Borrowing from the idea of documenting architecture decisions via ADRs, we started adopting a similar format — design system decision records — in order to document design system decisions with the corresponding rationale, research insights and experiment results. Communicating design system decisions effectively seems to be an emerging need of product development teams; doing it in this light manner is also recommended by zeroheight. This technique helped us reduce onboarding times, move conversations forward and align work streams that share the same design system.
