Design systems have a graveyard problem. Teams invest months building a shared library, ship it with fanfare, and then watch it quietly rot as product teams fork components the moment it can't keep up. I've seen it happen more than once, including on systems I built.
The failure is almost never technical. The tokens are fine. The components are fine. What breaks is the social contract: the implicit agreement that the system is worth the friction of following it.
Trust erodes the first time a team waits two weeks for a component the system doesn't have. It erodes a second time when they submit a contribution and never hear back. By the third time, they've already built their own shadow library, and you've lost them.
What I've found works: treat the system like a product, not an infrastructure project. That means a real backlog, real prioritisation, and someone whose job is to feel the friction product teams feel. Not a platform team that ships components, a product team that ships leverage.
The components are the output. Adoption is the metric. The system only works when teams choose it because it makes their lives easier, not because an architect said so.