Design systems have a reputation problem. The word conjures images of enormous Figma libraries, dedicated platform teams, and multi-quarter initiatives. For a team of two designers supporting a product with six engineers, that framing is paralyzing.
The good news is that you do not need a design system. You need the outputs of a design system: consistency, speed, and a shared vocabulary. Those are achievable with a fraction of the infrastructure.
Start with tokens, not components
Eight well-chosen design tokens will do more for your consistency than eighty components will. Define your colour palette (including semantic mappings like --color-success and --color-destructive), your type scale, and your spacing scale. Put them in CSS custom properties. Ship them.
Components built on top of those tokens will automatically be consistent. Components built without them will fight each other forever.
The discipline part
A design system is only as good as the commitment to use it. The commitment does not require process overhead — it requires one person with the authority to say "use the token" when someone tries to hardcode a value. In small teams, that person is usually the designer. Own it.