Most teams treat a design system as clean-up work. Treating it as groundwork changes the economics of everything built after it.
A redesign that ships without a shared component language starts accumulating inconsistency on day one. The second screen borrows from the first, the fifth borrows from the third, and within a quarter nobody can say which button is the real button.
Starting with tokens and a small set of primitives costs a few weeks up front. It repays that on the third product, when a new team ships a coherent interface without a designer reviewing every pixel.
The signal that you needed one earlier is always the same: a spreadsheet tracking which shade of blue each screen uses.
Facing something similar in your own team?
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