Herman Miller

We knew how we wanted to build our Design System, now it was time to choose the tools to get us there. The essence of Scrum is a small team of people. The team is highly flexible and adaptive. Perfect, so we'll work in 2 week sprints where each sprint can be a mix of new R&D stories, a presentation of decisions made, and showcasing key development milestones.

We are also able to run content stories in parallel, focusing development efforts around key areas of the site that our authors need first. Our stories would exist in a Jira backlog, documentation would be hosted in Confluence , and GitHub would host our codebase. If developers identify technical improvements during the sprint, they can be added as GitHub issues and transferred to Jira if we decide to represent them as stories for the Backlog. For Sprint Retrospectives, @groupmap proved to be a great way to include our remote members of the dev team.

This worked well for our team and allowed us to be flexible in what we wanted to build and how we wanted to build it. As we further defined our Backlog and estimated each story, we could accurately measure the team's capacity (velocity) and confidently estimate a launch date.

When we started thinking about technology options for our own Design System, we wanted to focus on two primary goals

1. Build a design system site using design system components - a living prototype
2. Explore new ways of working to position our technical capabilities for the future

We have a small team of developers responsible for the initial build so we knew that we couldn’t spend too much time maintaining infrastructure on the Backend. We also wanted freedom to make decisions on the Frontend with the ability to adapt over time.

For this first iteration we decided to use Node.js, React, and Next.js. Content will be managed via headless CMS in prismic.io.

1. @{Next.js}|tool:5936| so that we can run @{React}|tool:1020| serverside without worrying about server code.
2. @{prismic.io}|tool:673| so that our content is accessible via API and our frontend is fully independent.