How to divide your defect count by three in six months

A design system does not remove bugs. It removes the decisions that make them.

Over the first six months, the team stopped treating every screen as a special case. Loading states, error messages and validation rules were decided once, documented once, then reused.

The count of open defects at the end of a sprint went from forty-two to thirteen. None of those fixes was a last-minute patch: they are decisions nobody had to revisit.