There's a myth that design systems are something you start once you've grown past a certain size. The reverse is true — the right time is the moment you have two designers, or two engineers shipping UI, or any combination of the two.
What changes is the shape. A small-team design system is mostly tokens, a handful of primitives, and clear conventions. Not a thousand-page Storybook.
We've built this pattern half a dozen times at small companies and it holds up. Here's what to ship in week one, and what to deliberately defer.
