What does a design system product manager do?

Veda Rosier on the constant evolution of design systems and how the music of Minecraft became her playlist

Illustration by Gracia Lam

What do you do?

I’m a principal product manager for Spectrum, Adobe’s design system. I work with product and platform teams setting vision, defining strategy, and ensuring alignment with customer needs and business goals.

Since Adobe’s products are constantly evolving, we're always gathering requirements around any new or extended use cases so we can determine how to meet those needs. My role involves identifying and prioritizing requirements, making strategic decisions, and overseeing the product lifecycle from conception to launch and beyond. To source the data we need to generate our high-level roadmaps, so a big part of my job involves talking to people who work on teams across Adobe’s business units (Express, Creative Cloud, Document Cloud).

I interact with other product teams to better understand what type of “guidance” they need from Spectrum and help translate that into a vision and strategy that can be operationalized within the scope of the rest of our work. My role is mostly strategic, Spectrum program managers are at the detail level and translate the information I gather into actionable design and engineering projects (I couldn't do this work without them).

What's your team working on?

The past year we’ve been working to deliver Spectrum 2 for web. Now we’re working on onboarding a limited set of “lighthouse customers.” to provide feedback on the prerelease/beta implementations, and creating migration playbooks—which will help other product teams looking to adopt the new version of our design system. We’re also spinning up a Spectrum team to work on iOS, an Android team as a fast follow, and expect to begin desktop product experiences in early 2025.

What essential tool, product, or platform helps you do your best work?

As a team, we use Jira heavily to organize and track work from the initiatives that underpin our progress towards our team goals—it’s also one of the only tools that provides transparency into our work to users outside of Adobe Design.

I’m a fan of the new Canvas and Lists features in Slack, Figma works nicely for beautiful presentations, and I also love Apple Notes—because it’s so easy to access from my phone—as the starting place for almost all my ideas. I'm a single mom of four children, and when I'm sitting at soccer practice at night, and starting to wind down from the day, my brain starts working on problems in the background. I use the voice feature in Notes to jot down any ideas that seem worth pursuing.

What skill do you consider a superpower?

My product manager superpower is loving data and wanting to translate it into something useful for our products. I take clues from conversations, surveys, and customer interviews, and translate those into hypotheses and eventually into frameworks for collecting data.

What's on your heads-down, time-to-focus playlist?

I often work in the same room where my children are playing Minecraft. Whenever they’d walk away from their games, I noticed that the soundtrack helped me get into this incredible flow state. I did some reading about the neuroscience behind the game’s ambient music and how it boosts problem solving by helping people to get into a creative mindset. I eventually built a Spotify playlist around it and that’s what’s playing when focus is a necessity.

What's the best professional advice you've ever received?

Play on your strengths and natural talents rather than trying to improve your weaknesses.

What excites you most about the work you're doing?

There’s a scale to the building of Adobe’s products that’s not common to other companies so there’s a huge reward in seeing the work our team does to shape our products, integrate all the parts, and innovate as we go. I feel fortunate every day to be playing a part in supporting Adobe and helping it succeed.

What's a dream project you're currently involved with or want to take on?

I’m excited to see Spectrum grow to its full potential and become the foundation of product development at Adobe. Our prototyping team is developing a metrics tool and I’m looking forward to being empowered with adoption stats to help product teams decide where customizations may be needed. I’m also curious about how we (as a company and a society) will come to use generative AI in our workflows.

As far as things outside of what I get paid to do, I sit on the board of a project that helps people, who’ve been incarcerated, re-enter society. A lot of them have mental health issues, struggle with addiction, and endured living unhoused as children without access to consistent education. Once a week I make food and deliver it to homeless camps and other places where I know people are going to look for meals, in particular a women’s facility called Esther’s Place in Everett, Washington.