In the autumn of 2023, our design system had 347 components. Each had been shipped fast, merged without ceremony, and documented with a single line in our spec tool. We celebrated velocity. Sprint demos were impressive. But every time a product team combined three components into a layout, nothing fit together the way it should.
The Graduated Scale Problem
I spent two weeks that November auditing spacing tokens — eleven distinct values for "small" padding, each introduced by a different engineer in a different quarter. We had no graduated scale, no consistent unit of measure. Just approximate values that looked fine in isolation and broke the moment anything needed to compose.
Every mark on the scale must be placed with the same instrument.