The Design Principles Pyramid is a Canvas to help define the principles of your Design System. It is a free tool for leaders, facilitators and consultants to organize team alignment on where to start when building an efficient and fast Design System.
Ask everyone what problems they see in relation to design and create groupings of problems under the same theme. Using a method similar to the concept of User Reasearch.
Take all the groupings and separate them in the first part of the Canvas, separating by groups that affect the 3 categories: users, builders and stakeholders. A grouping can affect more than one category, you can repeat on the canvas.
As a team create principles that answer or help in grouping. Start at the bottom of the pyramid and climb up when you are satisfied. Then define metrics that help measure the success of these principles.
Design Lead at Dasa, Specialist in DesignOps and Design System, UX ROI Evangelist, Designer, Researcher, Instructor and Speaker.
Framework DesignOps in Dasa Digital Solutions Specialist - Front End and UX
If we look at a Design System as a product, then we have to look at the user. What happens is that we generally think that the Designer is this user and we forget another user as important as: The Developer. Therefore, the principles of a Design System should be regarded as the objectives of the product, which solve the operational problems between designers and developers.