The Small Team’s Guide to Design System Documentation
Mike Miller
Balancing time, resources, and quality is a constant challenge for smaller teams. We see you. You’re passionate about building great products, but limited bandwidth means keeping on top of documentation feels like an insurmountable problem.
Its our goal to make documentation feasible, even for lean teams. At FigMayo, we built our solution for people like you; teams striving for better design practices while juggling competing priorities. We want to help you save time, maintain momentum, and focus on doing what you love - creating great experiences.
I wanted to explore further why investing in a design system in the context of a small team can elevate your game and how automating your documentation makes this way more achievable.
Why Design Systems Are Worth It
Design systems bring consistency, efficiency, and scalability to your design process - we all know this. They’re more than just UI kits with a sprinkling of performance art. When done properly they form a single source of reliable truth that everyone on your team can lean on. They become a framework for design decisions, reusable components, and documentation that keeps everyone pointing in the same direction.
But the issue is, building and maintaining a design systems can be very time-intensive. Traditionally an undertaking so expensive it is out of reach of smaller teams. If you are brave enough to start out on this journey and your documentation falls out of sync (and it will, rapidly) then it can be a death knell for your project. Six months of grind down the toilet and red faces all round is nobodies idea of a fun time.
For small teams, the rewards of a design system can be massive, but the time required to invest properly was never really available. But, the game changed. In this new world our productivity has skyrocketed, bringing sophisticated practices well within reach for teams of any size.
The Challenges of Traditional Documentation
Tools like ZeroHeight promised to streamline documentation, but they demand too much from smaller teams. The license is costly, and you won't see any return on this investment for weeks, maybe even months, after signing up. First, you need to take a significant amount of time away from delivering value to shift focus and prepare your work for others to understand. This is an underrated skill—summarising and explaining your work clearly for an audience with different perspectives is challenging and can be a major obstacle.
This is where FigMayo aims to stand out. There's no heavy cognitive overhead—just click the button.
Automating Documentation
FigMayo integrates directly with Figma, transforming your design libraries into documentation websites with a single click. This saves a ton of time. For less than the cost of one hour of a junior designer per month, we handle all the setup, hosting, and maintenance of a detailed documentation site. As your designs change, the documentation can be updated in minutes with a single click, eliminating inconsistencies and the death knell of stale, unreliable information.
Ultimately leveraging automation in this way will reduce the overall investment in your DS, drive adoption, elevate your practice and de-risk your project work.
When to Choose Us
If documentation is stressing you out, if switching contexts is melting your mind, if your docs are outdated and becoming useless but you can't find the time to update them, then choose FigMayo.
If you hate duplication of effort, if the idea of valuable designer time being spent copy pasting information between tools brings you out in hives, if you just like efficiency, then choose FigMayo.
If you are in the enviable position of having deep pockets, a dedicated design system team and access to engineering support to configure and maintain deep integration into your code, then choose supernova (probably).
Ultimately the decision is a trade off between flexibility and control vs time and money. Select your preferred workflow that fits inside your constraints. There is probably not a one size fits all- but there might be a one size fits most and we think that is us.
Give us a shout if you would like to hear more.
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