Most teams think design system maturity is a ladder. It's not.

Nielsen Norman Group published a framework that treats design system maturity as six independent dimensions instead of a linear set of stages. Organizational alignment. Team effectiveness. Infrastructure. Governance. Support. Adoption.

Most teams I have worked with still talk about maturity like a level you unlock. Stage one, stage two, stage three, eventually you arrive.

That framing hides the actual problem. A design system can have brilliant infrastructure and terrible adoption. Great governance and zero organizational alignment, because nobody above the design team actually agreed to prioritize it. Treating those as one score just averages away the real bottleneck.

The useful move is not scoring your system higher. It's finding the one dimension that is actually dragging the other five down, and being honest that it might not be the one your team controls directly.

Which of those six is the one nobody on your team wants to admit is the actual blocker?