Skip to main content
Talk to an expert
Issue 034BenchmarkPerformanceRef 101

In conversation with a frontend lead: the design system decisions that paid back for three years

Discussing the long-term impact of early technical decisions on design debt and frontend efficiency. A strong design system can defer significant refactoring and accelerate delivery for years.

Heddwyn Coombs· Creative and Digital Director
4 min readReviewed April 2025
"A robust design system isn't just about aesthetics; it's a strategic investment that significantly reduces technical debt and accelerates feature delivery over the long term."
Written by
Heddwyn Coombs, Creative and Digital Director at iWeb
Heddwyn Coombs
Creative and Digital Director
29 years at iWeb

Heddwyn co-founded iWeb and leads creative and digital direction across the agency. Adobe Commerce architect since the Magento 1 era, he writes the strategy notes on platform choice, headless, agentic checkout, AI for commerce and the trade-offs leadership teams hit when modern tooling meets operational reality. Opinionated about data structure, design systems and catalogue size, cautious about unnecessary frontend complexity, and focused on work that stays commercially manageable over time.

Next in this thread

Operational notes worth reading next.

All notes in The Record →
Issue 047Benchmark · Performance

A 200ms search budget for storefronts: how we hit it on Adobe Commerce

Hitting a 200ms search budget on Adobe Commerce is an architecture problem, not a hardware problem. The choices that get you there, in the order they matter.

Andrew··4 min read
Issue 032Benchmark · Performance

Component governance for storefront teams: who owns the button, who owns the basket

Component governance defines ownership and responsibility for design system elements, crucial for B2B storefront consistency and preventing technical issues.

Ian··4 min read
Issue 032Benchmark · Performance

TTFB is the budget you forgot to set

TTFB is a critical yet often neglected performance metric. A poor server response time sets a low ceiling for other optimisations. Learn why it matters.

Andrew··5 min read
The briefing · regular

A regular round-up of new notes.
No content marketing.

Sent on the last Thursday of the month. The most useful five notes from the previous four weeks, written by the operators, architects, engineers and commercial leads running the work.
Next step

Take this conversation private.

If this note matches the brief on your desk, the version we'd write for your platform, sector and trade-account model is the work itself. Send a short brief and a senior lead replies inside 48 hours.
Talk to an expertBack to The Record →