Skip to main content
Maturity Assessment

Maturity Assessment

A Maturity Assessment helps you understand how ready both your organisation and your system are to grow. It looks at company culture, leadership support, funding, collaboration, and governance alongside system culture, adoption, contribution, and quality. By mapping both together, you can see where maturity is aligned, where gaps exist, and how much change your business can realistically handle.

Use this before setup to decide how to start, and later during scaling to adapt structures, contribution, or scope. Pair it with Rigidity vs Flexibility Mapping to translate maturity signals into clear direction for how strict or adaptable your system should be.

This tactic was inspired by Ben Callahan's book Maturing Design Systems

Steps

  1. Select dimensions

    • Business: leadership support, collaboration, funding, delivery culture.
    • System: adoption, contribution, documentation, and quality.

  2. Define scoring

    Use a 1-5 scale. Describe what low, medium, and high maturity look like for each factor.

  3. Run the assessment

    Bring in your system team and key stakeholders to score both business and/or system maturity honestly. When plotting on the scale, be sure to discuss rational to promote alignment.

  4. Plot results

    Map scores on a radar chart or grid to show strengths, gaps, and misalignments between business and system culture.

  5. Adapt decisions

    Based on where you and/or your organisation currently are will determine how far you can get with the decision you're trying to make. Use these outputs to inform your next steps, whether it be deciding between a Custom vs UI Kit, Choosing a Governance Model, Scaling your system further, or running Rigidity vs Flexibility Mapping to align system behaviour with business reality.

    • Ask AI to compare your scores against typical patterns and suggest specific actions for improvement