When people hear about CAPE, the immediate impression is usually about scale:
9 brands. 40+ components. Multi-platform support. Enterprise adoption.
It looks impressive on the surface. But with scale comes complexity, and with complexity come risks. These risks are not always visible in dashboards or roadmaps, but they quietly shape how effective a design system can truly be.
From our work on Cape, I’ve seen how these risks surface and how important it is to anticipate and address them early.
1. Adoption Risk – Building Without Users
A design system is only as valuable as its adoption. At Cape, we’ve learned that building well-engineered components is only half the work. Without strong communication, onboarding, and visible success stories, the system risks becoming something people admire but never actually use.
Some teams still default to building “their own version” of a button or token set, not because ours isn’t good enough, but because they don’t yet trust it, know it exists, or feel supported in migrating.
Mitigation: Treat adoption as a funnel, not an assumption. Start with awareness campaigns, provide simple migration guides, and celebrate every integration publicly. Make adoption feel less like compliance and more like empowerment.
2. Fragmentation Risk – Too Many Brands, Too Many Needs
Cape serves 9 brands, each with unique market requirements, brand identities, and user contexts. This diversity is powerful, but it also creates the risk of fragmentation. A single component can become overloaded with brand-specific variations, or worse, multiple versions of “the same” component can emerge across teams.
The result? A system that looks unified in name but fractured in practice. We’ve seen this tension especially in theming and platform-specific needs, where solving for one brand can unintentionally introduce complexity for another.
Mitigation: Define a clear model for flexibility versus consistency. Theming, contribution frameworks, and design governance help balance brand individuality with system integrity. Instead of saying “no,” define how a need can be solved in a scalable way.
3. Complexity Risk – The System Slows You Down
Ironically, the more comprehensive a system becomes, the more it risks slowing down the very teams it’s meant to accelerate. Backward compatibility, legacy browser support, and version management are necessary — but they can create friction.
In Cape, ensuring support for older Chrome versions while advancing toward modern capabilities required careful prioritization. Left unchecked, complexity accumulates until teams spend more time navigating the system than benefiting from it.
Mitigation: Simplify relentlessly. Audit components and tokens regularly. Deprecate what is no longer needed, and make it easy for teams to migrate. Complexity must be managed, or it will manage you.
4. Community Risk – Losing the Human Connection
A design system succeeds not because it exists, but because people believe in it. At Cape, we’ve seen that when teams feel disconnected from the system when it becomes a “black box” owned by a central team trust erodes. Shadow systems emerge, and adoption stalls.
The risk isn’t technical, it’s cultural. A system without a community is just a library.
Mitigation: Build trust through openness. Host office hours, invite contributions, and act on feedback. When contributors from outside the core team see their input reflected in Cape, they become advocates and advocacy spreads faster than any policy.
5. Resource Risk – Systems Outlive Teams
Teams change. Priorities shift. A design system can outlast the people who built it. This creates the risk of CAPE becoming an unsupported artifact technically present, but organisationally invisible.
We’ve seen how reorgs and shifting focus areas can stretch a small central team thin. Without safeguards, the system risks stagnation or abandonment.
Mitigation: Document obsessively. Create clear contribution and maintenance models that distribute responsibility across teams. Build resilience into the system so that no single person or group becomes a bottleneck.
6. Perception Risk – Undervaluing the Work
Perhaps the most difficult risk is perception. To many stakeholders, a design system can look “done” once the library is live. They see the Figma files, the npm packages, the documentation, and assume the job is complete.
But systems are never done. The hidden work migration support, governance, accessibility audits, bundle size optimization is less visible but just as essential. At CAPE, we’ve had to consistently frame this invisible effort in terms of business outcomes like faster shipping, reduced duplication, and improved quality.
Mitigation: Tell the story of the system. Translate design system health into metrics stakeholders understand adoption rates, migration velocity, saved engineering time. Make the invisible visible so that leadership values the ongoing investment.
Final Thought
A complex design system is like an iceberg: what you see on the surface the components, tokens, documentation is only a fraction of the work. Beneath lie risks that, if unmanaged, can quietly erode the system’s value.
At CAPE, we’ve learned that running a design system at enterprise scale is less about maintaining code and more about managing complexity, culture, and trust.
Because in the end, the measure of a design system is not how many components it contains, but how seamlessly it enables people to build.
Photo by Loic Leray on Unsplash
