312: Managing a Design Systems Team (feat. Diana Mounter)

In today's episode, Diana Mounter, who manages the design infrastructure at GitHub, helps us dive deep into a listener question about the role and expectations of a design systems manager. And we have a big round of cool things this week, including three books, an album, and a plugin.

Follow-up:

Keaton Taylor lolled pretty hard at our dumb 311 references. It was all worth it.
Thanks for leaving questions for us at the Design Details repo!

Interview:

Diana Mounter manages the design infrastructure known as Primer at GitHub.

You can listen to Diana's previous appearances on Design Details in the following episodes:

74: Itchy Feet (feat. Diana Mounter)
123: Live @ Github (feat. Carolyn Zhang, Heather Phillips, Mo Woods & Diana Mounter)
246: Cats & Design Systems (feat. Diana Mounter & Brent Jackson)

agabrans asks, "What is the role of a Design Systems Manager, and what is expected of this individual?"

Material Design
Apple Human Interface Guidelines
Article: The 8-Point Grid by Bryn Jackson

One Cool Thing:

Diana shared three things:

Bitmoji for Slack lets you "bring office chat to life with your own personal emoji"
"Reamde" by Neal Stephenson is "the breathtaking tale of a wealthy tech entrepreneur caught in the very real crossfire of his own online fantasy war game"

The sign in Jimmy John's reads: "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."
Dan Brown is known for his fluffy but exciting thriller novels like "The DaVinci Code"

"Wallop" (YouTube playlist) is the latest album from !!!

Alt-J (or, more accurately, option-j) typed on an Apple keyboard results in the ∆ character
"Off the Grid" and "In the Grid"

Marshall shared "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell: A Novel" by Neal Stephenson, "a wildly inventive and entertaining science fiction thriller that unfolds in the near future, in parallel worlds"

The "Bobiverse" series by Dennis E. Taylor is the story of a programmer who dies suddenly and, after being cryogenically frozen, wakes up as an AI in a vastly changed world
"Seveneves" by Neal Stephenson is "an exciting and thought-provoking science fiction epic—a grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years"

Brian shared "How to Stop Time" by Matt Haig, "a love story across the ages—and for the ages—about a man lost in time, the woman who could save him, and the lifetimes it can take to learn how to live"

"2312" by Kim Stanley Robinson is "the story of a future where humanity has populated miraculous new habitats engineered across the solar system--and the one death that triggers a precarious chain of events that could destroy it all"

Design Details on the Web:

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Marshall is @marshallbock
@Sarahberus and @Luperdev make us sound smarter than we are

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BYEEEEE!