Shaun Bent

Seriously. Every message in a channel is not a personal message to you that requires a response. 🤦‍♂️

Hello. Content design and design systems consultant

It’s that time again - I’m on the hunt for new clients from the beginning of April. I’m open to full or part-time contracts outside IR35.

I can help you with:

- design system consultancy, coaching, management or documentation
- content design
- UX writing
- technical writing

1/2

Very nice to wake up to this! 💚

Design systems are platform problems, not feature problems Where you put your design system team with your organisation determines how they think, what they build, and whether the system stays a platform or the teams become a UI feature factory.

Design systems are platform problems, not feature problems.

Operating within a feature organisation can push design system teams from macro thinking to micro thinking. That misalignment compounds until the system stops functioning as a platform.

www.shaunbent.co.uk/blog/design-...

This needs a flashing light warning. 🙈 It was a lot, but I loved it. 💜

This is going to be a great episode of “24 hours in Police custody”!

🙏💜

Try now. 🙏

Every company has that one person who it seems like all they do is sit on Slack all day, instantly responding to everything and seems to be in every channel and conversation. 🙈

Thank you for reading it. 💜

Thanks for reading and saying that. 🙏 We both worked there long enough to know how wild and nonsensical some of the decisions are. Not the most fun situation, but it was fun to write about.

Thanks for sharing. You're right about the positioning challenge. When leadership doesn't see design systems as critical infrastructure, they treat them as shuffleable nice-to-haves.

That gap is where these bad decisions come from and the challenge we as DS leaders need to overcome.

When the Decision Is Made, and You Can't Change It Sometimes decisions are made for you. They're clearly wrong, and you can't change them. This is about how you lead anyway.

Sometimes decisions are made for you. Everyone knows they're wrong, but you can't change them, and as a leader, you have to guide your team through it.

I wrote a story of layoffs, reorgs, and bad decisions. How I led my team through it, and what I learnt.

www.shaunbent.co.uk/blog/when-th...

That was a lot. 😳

If I were still a manager there, I'd make it very clear to my team: I don't expect you to work on your own time. I expect you to maintain a healthy work-life balance. And I'd suggest leaving Slack off your phone.

Good leadership protects people from this; it doesn't promote it as aspirational.

"...an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute...can tell Claude to fix a bug...all before they even arrive at the office."

This isn't the win you think it is. 🤦‍♂️ It's normalising work on personal time, eroding boundaries, and celebrating always-on culture as innovation.

I shared some thoughts on handling breaking changes in design systems for @zeroheight.com.

A bunch of lessons learnt from my time leading design systems at Spotify.

Thanks for writing up your thoughts. The meme is perfect. 🙈

A screenshot of Lucy Powell’s Bluesky post about voting Labour in the Gorton & Denton by-election and how a vote for any other party is a vote to let Reform in. She has disabled comments and quote reposts.

Just @lucympowell.bsky.social talking about Labour and the Gorton and Denton by-election but disabling comments and quote reposts.

It’s almost like Labour wants to avoid a debate and discussion. 👎

The complete opposite approach to the engagement you get from @zackpolanski.bsky.social 💚

Thanks for reading and sharing. 🙏💜

Accessibility For Everyone by Laura Kalbag Read the book online for free.

My book, Accessibility For Everyone, is now free and online as a website.

accessibilityforeveryone.site

The book was first published by A Book Apart in 2017 but it holds up! It covers web accessibility for designers, developers, content folks, and really everyone who works in tech.

Hiring a Design Engineer for Kesko Design System Hi 👋🏻, I’m Arielle, a Design Systems Architect working with Kesko. I’m currently helping to strengthen the existing design systems team in the organization and we’re looking for an experienced Design ...

Would you like to work with me? 👋🏻 I’m currently helping to strengthen the existing design systems team at Kesko and we’re looking for a nice & talented designer/developer to join us.

arielsalminen.com/2026/hiring-...

Love it. 🧡 I really want to build something like this for my vinyl collection. Discogs is crap and it doesn’t look nice.

I like to treat Figma as just another platform the design system supports: web, iOS, Android, and Figma. They all need to stay in sync.

Having someone dedicated to content your systems team can be a game changer but agree often something that is neglected or certainly lower on the hiring prio list.

When you say supporting 4-20+ engineers, do you mean the engineers on your design system team, or engineers on product teams who were customers of the system?

If it's the latter, that's closer to what I'm advocating for: small DS teams with strong engineering capacity, serving many product teams.

That said, I didn't read all 256 in detail, so there's definitely room for some to have slipped through. And you're right, I didn't touch on it in the article. Worth considering for sure.

I've worked with some incredible designers who are more than happy to jump into code. 😍

Good point. From what I saw, designer roles rarely listed code as a core requirement. Where design and code were combined, they tended to be design engineer or design technologist roles, which I counted as engineering roles. I saw a few roles with code listed as a nice to have.

@menosketiago.bsky.social said a similar thing over on LinkedIn. I know whenever I advertised a role on a DS there was a lot of interest internally. A lot of interest in working on the DS team.

100% on all roles providing value. I hope the peice didn't come across as me suggesting anything other, as that was not my intention or goal.

Is There Too Much Design in Design Systems? Why are we hiring so many designers? Most design system roles are design-focused, but the biggest value comes from code. Are we building design systems, or just designing them?

Why are we hiring so many designers?

I analysed 256 design system roles. The ratio of designers to engineers was telling. In my last team, we deliberately ran the inverse. If the biggest value comes from code, are we building design systems or just designing them?