What is the most effective UI design documentation within a large organization?

Much of our work today is about agreement in an organization. In fact, when people ask me to define a design system, I often reply with that single word: agreement. The resources we maintain represent those agreements. A design system maintainer doesn’t really care what color a button is. They care about getting the organization to agree on which color it should be.

The complexity of our role lies in managing expectations before these agreements are made: the expectations of users who will one day interact with the products, and the expectations of peers who are building the next version of those products. When marketing says they need a carousel, the challenge isn’t the carousel itself, it’s gathering requirements across humans: our users and our peers. That process produces tokens, components, and guidelines. Abstractly, though, those are just agreements.