system-pitch
System pitch
A skill for writing a design system investment pitch that leads with a business problem, builds an honest ROI case, and addresses likely objections. Output is a pitch document that works for an audience who has never heard of a design system and does not need to.
Before you begin: verify references
Confirm that every path in this skill's frontmatter references: exists relative to this SKILL.md. If any is missing, stop: the install is incomplete, usually because a flattening installer (for example npx skills install) dropped the repo-root knowledge-notes/ directory. Tell the user to reinstall by a method in 1-INSTALL.md and run verify-install.sh from the install root. Proceed without the references only if the user explicitly says to, and then say in the output that it was produced without the pack's reference material.
Context
Design system pitches usually fail for one of two reasons. They lead with the design system — its components, its tokens, its Storybook — rather than with the business problem it solves. Or they oversell: promising a design system will solve problems it cannot solve, which creates scepticism or, worse, expectation debt that damages credibility when the system ships and the promised outcomes do not materialise.
The pitch that works leads with the cost of the current state. It makes the reader feel the friction of inconsistency, the waste of duplicated effort, the risk of inaccessible interfaces — before it introduces the design system as the solution. Then it is specific about what the investment costs, honest about the timeline, and precise about what success looks like.
Audience calibration, framing patterns, metric translation, anti-patterns and the numbers-honesty rules are shared with stakeholder-brief and live in the executive-communication note. This skill covers what is specific to an investment case.