Design systems that survive handover
Most design systems decay the moment the designer leaves. The ones that survive share a single source of truth with the code, not a screenshot of one.
A design system that lives only in Figma is documentation. It describes what the product should look like, and describes it with decreasing accuracy from the day it is handed over.
The drift is structural, not a discipline problem. Engineers implement a component, a rounding gets approximated, a spacing step gets eyeballed, a colour is copied from the wrong layer. None of it is wrong enough to raise, and after a year the file and the product are different products.
The fix is to make tokens the shared artefact. Colour, type, spacing and elevation defined once, exported to both the design tool and the codebase from the same source. When a token changes, both move, and neither side is transcribing values by hand.
Components then need to be mapped rather than described. Code Connect links a Figma component to the actual implementation, so a designer opening a component sees the props an engineer will use. This removes the most common handover conversation entirely, because there is nothing to interpret.
The last piece is governance, and it is the one clients resist because it sounds like process. Someone owns the system, contributions go through review, and adding a one-off variant requires justifying it. Without that, a system becomes a component graveyard within two releases.
We measure success by a single question asked a year later: did the product drift from the system? If a team we handed over to is still shipping in it without us, it worked.