Pajamas Design System

The Pajamas Design System is GitLab’s shared foundation for designing and building the core product experience. It provides design tokens, components, patterns, and guidance that help teams create cohesive, accessible, and high-quality experiences efficiently and at scale.

Pajamas supports GitLab.com, GitLab Self-Managed, and GitLab Dedicated, while also enabling consistency across the broader GitLab ecosystem through shared foundations such as tokens, patterns, and Figma libraries.

The Design System team maintains and evolves the Pajamas Design System in close partnership with contributors and teams across GitLab.

Operating principles

The Design System team operates with a strong focus on collaboration, contribution, and delivery. The following principles guide how we work with product teams while continuing to invest in the strategic evolution and health of the system, including visual quality, technical debt, and tooling improvements.

Our system and strategy work is informed by what we learn through service delivery and is scoped to ensure we can meet our commitments.

1. Speedy decision making: We actively guide discussions toward decisions and resolution and stay with them to the end. We shape proposals quickly, identify what is needed, and give clear next steps — all within our service commitments. For complex work, we break decisions into smaller pieces so everyone can keep moving.
2. Service-first mindset: We prioritize unblocking product teams. When teams need something, our default is “how do we help them move forward?”. We work with teams to find solutions that enable progress, even if they’re not perfect yet.
3. Scoped for delivery: We scope work so it can ship and then improve through iteration rather than waiting for a perfect solution, while maintaining our standards for accessibility, visual quality, performance, and code quality.
4. Shared ownership model: We partner with product teams on the implementation with shared responsibilities and ownership.
5. Proactive connection: We identify common needs and emerging themes from across product teams to prioritize system work based on what would unblock the most teams.

Service commitments

When engaging with product teams on Pajamas-related work, the Design System team operates with the following service commitments:

• 48-hour response: Every request receives an initial response within 48 hours.
• One-week path forward: Within one week, teams receive clear direction on how their problem will be addressed.
• Two-week decisions: Decisions are time-boxed to a maximum of two weeks. If something is complex, it is intentionally broken into phases.
• Transparent communication: If the Design System team cannot help within these timeframes, we explain why and provide alternative paths forward.

Collaboration guidelines

Pajamas is effective only through collaboration between the Design System team and product teams. The design system provides stable foundations; product teams apply those foundations to solve real user problems. Quality and coherence emerge from this partnership, not from a single owner.

Ownership and quality expectations

Quality and coherence rely on clear roles and mutual accountability.

• The Design System team provides accessible, tested, and documented foundations, along with guidance on appropriate usage.
• Product teams are responsible for applying those foundations thoughtfully and ensuring the resulting experience is cohesive, usable, and high quality within their domain.

When building together or contributing back:

• Product teams bring the use case, context, and initial solution.
• The Design System team brings system knowledge, refinement, and integration.
• Both parties work together to make the result usable by others.
• Neither party should carry the majority of the work alone.

This model allows the system to scale while staying grounded in real product needs.

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