[redbonsai]

Embarking on a similar process at my company, and hit a similar wall using symbols in Sketch. They're great, but are a pain to maintain for a pattern library project.

We had a breakthrough last week when InVision updated their Craft plugin for Sketch to include Library [1]. Well worth a look, we've tried poking holes and it's held up. Syncs seamlessly across Dropbox/etc and allows for on-the-fly updates that go out to the team "magically". Requires education to make sure our junior designers aren't accidentally updating styles cross-team, but outside of that works as advertised. Very impressive for a v1!

[1] http://blog.invisionapp.com/cloud-connected-design-assets-li...

[enra]

At Airbnb, we also started building the library with symbols but noticed that it didn't work, at least before Sketch 3.5 or something.

In our case, we want that people can change the symbol sizes (eg. you need to fit in more content in to a header). If you need resize or accidentally resize something, Sketch would automatically resize every instance of that symbol. That would kill your sketch for few moments and probably mess up your file permantently (sometimes you couldn't undo the damage you had done.). So we ended up putting the components in Layer Groups, and let people copy and paste them.

Newer Sketch symbol support have gotten better, but I'm still hesitant to change to it, since it seems something they haven't nailed down yet.