Collaboration Within a Single Design System
In a single design system setup, all contributors—designers, developers, and documentation specialists—work together in the same shared space. This makes collaboration more streamlined but also requires thoughtful coordination to ensure everything runs smoothly. From role management to content approval, Supernova offers tools that help maintain structure and clarity, even as more teams contribute to the system.
With this setup, you’re centralizing all documentation, tokens, assets, and code exports into a single design system. While this reduces complexity, it also means that everyone with editing permissions shares access to the entire system—so clarity around roles and responsibilities is essential.
Supernova uses role-based access control at both the Workspace and Design System levels. However, in this unified setup, access isn’t limited to specific brands or sections—so it’s important to set up your roles and workflows to ensure accountability.
Assigning Roles to Match Responsibilities
Here’s a quick breakdown of the available roles in Supernova and how they can be used effectively in this setup:
- Owner: Full control over workspace settings and permissions.
- Admin: Oversees workspace members, manages pipelines and global configuration.
- Editor: Can edit tokens, components, and documentation. Ideal for core contributors.
- Contributor: Can draft changes and suggestions, but cannot publish.
- Viewer: Read-only access for stakeholders, external vendors, or consultants.
💡 Pro tip:
Assign Contributors to external partners or team members who should propose changes without publishing. Keep Editors reserved for those responsible for reviewing and approving updates.
Best Practices for Role Management
- Use Admins for Global Governance: Assign Admins at the workspace level to manage high-level configuration and team roles.
- Enable Editors for Core Teams: Grant editing rights to design and engineering leads responsible for maintaining documentation and design tokens.
- Leverage Contributors for Controlled Input: Give limited permissions to collaborators who contribute content or metadata but don’t need publishing rights.
- Limit Viewer Access for Clarity: Avoid noise by only giving viewing rights to those who don’t need to contribute directly.
Collaborating with Structure: Approval Workflows
In a shared system like this, structure is everything. Supernova’s Approval Workflows help teams stay aligned and ensure that only vetted content makes it into production.
By enabling page statuses—Draft, In Review, and Approved—your team can follow a clear editorial flow when updating documentation.
Here’s how a structured collaboration flow could look:
1️⃣ A Contributor proposes changes to documentation or metadata.
2️⃣ The update enters the “In Review” status for feedback.
3️⃣ An Editor reviews and, if approved, moves it to “Ready for Publish.”
4️⃣ The changes go live, ensuring high-quality, validated updates.
This approach is especially useful when multiple teams are contributing at the same time—reducing confusion, preventing overwrites, and maintaining system integrity.
🔑 Key Takeaways
- Use clear roles to assign responsibilities in a shared system.
- Approval workflows ensure content quality in a collaborative environment.
- Since all editors have access to the full system, communication and responsibilities are essential.
- Notifications and comments help teams work asynchronously and stay aligned.
➡ What’s Next?
If your organization is starting to scale beyond what a unified system can support—such as needing isolated documentation sites, stricter governance, or independent workflows across business units—then Setup 2 might be the right next move.
📖 → Jump to Chapter 4: Separate Design Systems Setup
Already confident in your structure and ready to automate? Head to Chapter 5 to learn how to scale your system with code automation, from exporting tokens to syncing across platforms.
