Design systems are powerful tools. They ensure that visual and interaction design are consistent, freeing teams to tackle real user problems instead of pixel pushing. When built well, they embed accessibility and design expertise right into the system, so not every designer or engineer needs to be an expert.

Design systems vary in complexity. Some just cover basics like typography, colors, and brand rules. Others offer code components for features like search and navigation. The most advanced systems even define interaction patterns, specifying gestures, animation timing, and feedback types.

But here’s what all design systems have in common: they all need an enforcer.

What a Design-System Enforcer Does

The enforcer role sounds authoritarian, but it’s really about stewardship.

An enforcer:

• Ensures that teams use the design system. It’s easy for teams to build their own solutions when they’re moving fast or don’t fully understand what’s already available.
• Makes sure that necessary changes get rolled back into the system. Sometimes teams need a new pattern or component. The enforcer ensures those innovations benefit everyone, not just one team.
• Helps teams compromise when needs conflict. Different teams will want different things. The enforcer facilitates those conversations and makes the final call when consensus isn’t possible.

Why Design-System Enforcement Matters

You might think, “We hired smart people. They’ll do the right thing.” And they will try. But good intentions aren’t enough.

Not everyone is a design-system expert. The people who built and maintain the design system understand how it works across the entire organization. Individual teams know their corner of the product. You need someone with a holistic view making decisions that affect the whole.

Small deviations compound quickly. I once worked at an ecommerce company with a standard product-carousel component. It worked perfectly until every product manager started requesting “small” adjustments for their area. One wanted their product names to be bigger. Another needed to display prices differently. A third wanted customers to purchase directly from the carousel cards.

Over time, we had dozens of carousel variations. Engineers couldn’t maintain them because each had unique logic. Worse, customers were confused. On a single page, carousels behaved completely differently from each other. What should have been a consistent, learned interaction became a cognitive burden and a visual mess. The carousel had become carousels, and none of them were as good as the original.

Teams optimize locally, not globally. A product manager running the checkout flow has different incentives than someone running the browse experience or the account-settings page. Each will push for changes that help their metrics. Without someone thinking about the whole product, you get a Frankenstein’s monster of competing patterns, especially on components like search, which should work the same everywhere.

Designers need backup. When a product manager insists on a change that will hurt overall consistency because they believe it will improve their feature’s performance, designers need support. “The design system says no” is much easier than “I personally think this is a bad idea.” It moves the conversation from opinion to established principle.

How to Enforce a Design System Effectively

Having an enforcer doesn’t mean being inflexible or building an ivory tower. It means being thoughtful and consistent about how the system evolves.

Get executive support. The design-system team needs authority to veto changes that break consistency. Without top-down backing, enforcement becomes a suggestion that teams ignore when it’s inconvenient. Make sure leadership understands that consistency is a feature, not a constraint.

Get engineering support. Engineers can be your best allies. Not only do good design systems make the product better, they also make life easier for engineers, who won’t constantly have to maintain dozens of versions of the same component. Just like the designers, they can focus on the difficult engineering tasks and not on making small tweaks to the visual design.

Hold regular review sessions. You can’t enforce what you don’t know about. Schedule recurring reviews with product teams to see what they’re building and understand why they want specific changes. These shouldn’t feel like audits. They’re collaborative sessions where the enforcer can suggest existing solutions or identify legitimate gaps in the system.

Time reviews strategically. Review too early and teams don’t have enough to show you. Review too late and they’ve already shipped. Find the sweet spot where designs are concrete enough to evaluate but not so far along that changes are prohibitively expensive. This usually means catching teams after initial design exploration but before final implementation.

Create a clear contribution process. Teams need an obvious, low-friction way to request changes or propose new components. If the process is unclear or burdensome, people will work around it. A simple submission form or regular office hours can work. Document what information you need and what the timeline for decisions looks like.

Be responsive and reasonable. This is the hardest part. If you reject every request, teams will route around you. If you approve every exception, the system becomes meaningless. You need judgment.

I’ve seen enforcers succeed by following a principle: If this change would help three or more teams, it probably belongs in the system. If it’s unique to one use case, it’s probably an exception. And if you’re not sure, prototype it with one team first, then decide whether to standardize it.

The Real Goal

Here’s what trips people up: they think enforcement is about saying no. It’s not. It’s about saying yes to the right things at the right time.

I once worked with a design-system team that was struggling. Teams were ignoring their components and building custom solutions. When I dug in, I found the problem was that the enforcers were inflexible. They’d built a system they loved, and they protected it fiercely from any changes.

They weren’t wrong that changes would compromise the system’s purity. But they were wrong about priorities. A perfect system that nobody uses is worthless. A slightly messier system that solves real problems is valuable.

After we adjusted their approach (faster review cycles, clearer yes/no criteria, and a willingness to evolve the system based on needs), adoption skyrocketed. Teams started using components because they trusted that the system would grow with them.

Another team I worked with was the complete opposite. They designed a system that was so loose and open ended that teams were allowed to do practically anything they wanted, as long as they used the approved company colors and fonts. This led to anarchy. Teams constantly redesigned simple components when they could have reused work already done by other designers, and the result was almost as bad as if they had no system at all.

Final Thoughts

Design systems represent a huge investment. They require ongoing maintenance, documentation, and evangelism. But without enforcement, that investment gets diluted by a thousand small compromises until you’re back where you started, with every team doing its own thing.

The enforcer role isn’t about control. It’s about understanding when to hold the line on consistency and when to evolve. It’s about helping teams work together even when they have competing needs. And it’s about ensuring that the system serves users first, not internal convenience.

Your design system needs an enforcer. Give them the authority, tools, and support to do the job well, and you’ll get the benefits your design system promises.