Startups love chasing maturity. Especially when things start to feel messy. There is always a moment where someone lifts their head and says, “We have grown. Things are not as fast or clean as they used to be. We need systems. We need roles. We need proper design.”
This is usually when someone decides they need a Head of Design. Or a design system. Or a set of rituals that will somehow make the mess go away.
But most of the time, the mess is not a maturity problem. It is just the natural consequence of doing too much, too fast, with not enough people. A new title will not fix that. A glossy playbook will not either. And trying to fast-forward into someone else’s version of “mature” usually just slows you down and introduces bloat you do not need yet.
I have seen this happen across startups, corporates, and scale-ups. The pattern is the same: instead of solving the actual problem in front of them, teams try to solve their vibe.
One of the easiest traps is copying what worked somewhere else. You hear that Company X uses tokens. That they have polished rituals and beautiful documentation. That they have built a huge design system and have a Figma plugin for everything.
So you bring that into your team, hoping for the same results.
What you do not see is the years it took to get there. Or how deeply those tools are tied to the way that company actually works. Without that context, you are just bolting on structure for its own sake. The form without the function.
You copied the ceremony, not the intent.
Up did not have a design system for the first four years.
Not because we were careless, but because the product was evolving so quickly that a system would have slowed us down. It would have locked in assumptions too early. We needed to move fast, try things, and let the product itself shape the patterns.
Instead of a system, we had shared values. Tight feedback loops. Designers who gave a shit and cared deeply about quality. That worked because we were close to the product and to each other. We did not need a rulebook to stay consistent.
Eventually, we built a system. But only once the product had stabilised and the patterns were real. It was not a shortcut to good design. It was the byproduct of it.