How to work with the Design Systems Team

While Product Designers at Twilio are expected to partner with the Design Systems team for their work, we recommend that all Paste users (PMs, Engineers, etc.) engage with us early, and often! Our team provides ways to connect with the team that are timezone-friendly, and offer a safe, inclusive space to incubate your ideas as they becomes great Twilio experiences. Here are some checkpoints that are great times to reach out to our team.

• After your first week at Twilio! Come say hi at #help-design-system on Slack and introduce yourselves! We'd love to hear your journey, and share how our team works.
• You (or a representative designer from your group) will be invited every 6 months to our roadmap planning sessions: share what's coming up from a UI perspective, and any components or compositions that you believe will be essential to build a great customer experience. Post in #help-design-system if you have questions.
• At the start of a project. Reach out to us at our weekly office hours with a heads up on the project, any deadlines for delivery, and any components or compositions that you're confident will be necessary.
• At the start of medium or high fidelity design. This is a great time to share your specific needs with the design systems team. You may also begin to receive feedback on accessibility or pattern usage at this stage.
• Before user testing or UX reviews. Before you share your ideas with customers or get a sign off on the final design, drop by for a deep dive on copy, component and composition usage, accessibility, and other design considerations.
• Before launch. We'll use this time to do a final polish on the work, and discuss what changes we may need to make after your product's released.

We're excited to partner with you on building better products. Towards this, you can expect the following levels of support from the team:

• Request components or patterns that you may need for your customer experiences.
• Get feedback on usage of Paste components and compositions in your mocks and/or UIs.
• Get information about building more accessible UIs, and any common pitfalls that one might typically encounter.
• Get support on hierarchy, weight, and spacing in your UIs.
• Get answers to clarifying questions about Design Systems concepts.
• Verify if your UIs are aligned with the Paste content guidelines
• Get constructive feedback that helps your UI follow design system and accessibility conventions that are expected for Twilio UX reviews.

It's important to note that the Design Systems team does not directly talk to customers, and is not a replacement for research and customer understanding. While we're happy to provide feedback on the product decisions made, we recommend testing with customers or customer proxies to better understand if we're solving for their needs.

• We recommend searching this website before reaching out to the team for help. It may be the quickest way to get you going.
• Still need help? Start a discussion on GitHub. Paste is free and open-source, so all you need is a free GitHub account to post questions.
• Have a feature or component request? For Twilio employees, submit a dependency request, and we'll follow up with next steps. For everyone else, please start a GitHub discussion.
• Spotted a bug or error? File an issue
• Need urgent support? Reach out in Slack on #help-design-system.
• Looking for updates? Join #help-design-system! We also send out a newsletter after each release to all of Twilio R&D. Please reach out to us if you'd like to receive these email updates.

Weekly Design Systems office hours are held on Thursdays. Use these sessions to plan out your UI needs, get feedback on implementation, or debug an issue. You can find the sign-up link in #help-design-system. These meetings are also visible on the UX Calendar.