It might feel like an impossible dream, but in the digital product development landscape, aligning design, product, and engineering efforts is necessary to achieve operational efficiency and enhance outcomes. At Knapsack, we’ve made that impossible dream a reality. We're not just creating a platform; we're pioneering a comprehensive solution to unify these disciplines under one roof, ensuring seamless collaboration and coherence across enterprise product teams. Some of the technical considerations and collaborative complexities of design systems in the enterprise environment have been covered in our article on planning the technical architecture of your design system.
The Challenge: A Tangled Web of Processes
Imagine the daily reality for a digital product team: countless round-trips between design and code, each design alteration triggering a domino effect through development and engineering, necessitating updates in documentation overseen by product managers. This cycle is not just complicated; it's a breeding ground for errors and misalignment. Now, multiply this flawed process across the entire portfolio of digital products for an enterprise, and the scale of the challenge becomes clear. Just as you ship your org chart, you also ship your process, dysfunctions and all.
Knapsack was born from a recognition of this chaos. Our journey began as an agency tasked with constructing large-scale web platforms, and this vantage point allowed us to witness the struggles faced by diverse companies firsthand. We observed the endless cycle of challenges and pondered a seemingly outrageous idea: could we enable the launch of varied products on a common web platform, employing a unified design system?
Understanding the Problem of Complex and Complicated Systems
A unified design system platform is both complex and complicated. These terms are frequently used as synonyms but they are very different. Let's use the metaphor of a forest and a jigsaw puzzle to differentiate between complexity and complicated.
A forest represents complexity. Imagine walking into a vast, dense forest. This forest is an ecosystem with countless varieties of trees, plants, animals, insects, and various microclimates. Everything in the forest is interconnected in ways that can be difficult to predict or fully understand. Something that happens in one part of the forest can have a cascading effect on other parts, influenced by a multitude of factors like weather patterns, animal behavior, and growth cycles. This ecosystem is complex. It is dynamic, often unpredictable, and its various elements interact in ways that can change over time. Navigating this forest requires the ability to recognize the relationships and interactions between its parts, rather than just focusing on individual elements.
On the other hand, a jigsaw puzzle is not complex, it is merely complicated. Consider a 1000-piece jigsaw. The puzzle is intricate, with many small, interlocking pieces that must be precisely fitted together to complete the picture. Although this can be time-consuming and requires attention to detail, the process is fundamentally predictable. Each piece has a specific place, and with enough time and effort, you can figure out exactly where each piece fits, based on its shape and the image it contains. This puzzle represents something that's complicated. It's a challenge that can be solved through analysis, the application of a specific set of rules (in this case, matching shapes and images), and a step-by-step process that leads to a definitive solution.
Complexity requires adaptive thinking as it involves elements that interact in unpredictable ways, while resolving something that's complicated might be difficult but is ultimately predictable and can be solved with enough information and the right techniques.
From these metaphors, you can see that while the idea of a unified design system is complicated, the ecosystem of people and connected systems makes it complex.
The Knapsack Approach: A Unified Vision
Knapsack serves as the central hub for design and engineering collaboration. Our robust, ever-expanding tool is inspired by real world cases and real world companies, taking input from designers, developers, and engineering teams to facilitate a shared workspace that bridges the gap between design tools like Figma and engineering environments such as VS Code. This convergence is not merely about tool integration; it's about fostering a culture of collaboration and efficiency.
Knapsack's approach embodies the essence of complex versus complicated systems, recognizing the interconnectedness of elements while offering structured solutions. The launch of various products on a common web platform becomes not just a possibility, but a streamlined reality, allowing efficiency and collaboration in digital product development. By bridging the gap between design tools and engineering environments, Knapsack empowers teams to seamlessly iterate and innovate within a unified design system framework.
