Why Design belongs to Engineers too

Gigi Janelidze, Head of Design and UX at Salmon Group. A Georgian who has spent twenty years working at the intersection of different worlds and cultures — at Yandex, MTS, Sber, TBC Group, and others. Now he leads design and UX at Salmon Group in the Philippines. He has built design functions from scratch, led transformations, hired, mentored, and let people go, and founded several professional communities. A certified NN/g and IxDF expert, and a member of the Advisory Board of Design Institute Tbilisi. We treat the design system as a deliverable that design hands to engineering — and then pay for it every day in rework, drift, and slow decisions. In this talk I'll argue the opposite: a design system is an internal product whose customers are engineers, which means engineers have to be its co-authors, not its recipients. I'll show why the design ↔️ engineering wall is an org-design problem, not a people problem. You'll leave with one question worth bringing back to your own team: whose product is your design system, and who's allowed to build it?