The team is expanding rapidly: prioritize the system before everything drifts.
After the funding round, the team doubled in size, and each department created slides in their own style. This is a sign to stop and build a system, not to create more.
When the SaaS team expands rapidly, what breaks first is not the product but consistency: sales slides, marketing landing pages, and recruitment documents each going in different directions. What needs to be done is to establish and maintain a design system that covers both the product and sales materials, while also having someone own that system in the long term. This is a management and framework issue, not just a matter of quickly adding more designs.
- each department is redesigning buttons, colors, and layouts
- a sales team replicating old slides incorrectly to close deals
- The volume of design requests exceeds the capacity for spontaneous handling.
- Expectations for a retainer to fully take on the role of strategic marketing director.
- needs to run performance ads and purchase media
After the funding round, the team grew from ten to thirty people in six months. This means adding three or four departments, each creating materials in their own way. Sales has its own slide deck, marketing has its own landing page, and recruitment has its own poster. From the outside, the brand looks like it belongs to three different companies. This is not the fault of the new employees. This is a failure of the system not keeping pace with growth.
The first breakthrough is consistency
Many SaaS companies go through this phase and realize it too late. The product still runs well, the technology remains stable, but each time potential customers interact with the brand through various touchpoints, they receive inconsistent signals. Colors mismatch, tones differ, logos are stretched on an A4 document. Customers perceive this even if they do not articulate it.
The issue is not a lack of talented individuals. The problem is the absence of a common framework for talented people to do things correctly from the start.
Three items to prioritize
When the team is expanding, the time and budget need to be allocated to three areas in the following order.
- The design system covers both product and marketing. Many companies have a design system for product interfaces but leave marketing and sales out. As a result, the two worlds are disconnected: frontend engineer components look one way, while sales slide templates look different. A true design system must allow product, marketing, and brand to operate on a unified foundation.
- Standard reusable sales collateral library. Presentation decks, one-pagers, case studies by customer industry. The goal is not to be more attractive, but to help new salespeople ramp up quickly and avoid deviating from standards when closing deals.
- DesignOps coordinator role: this person manages the flow of design requests from departments, guides decision-making in case of conflicts, and keeps the larger system cohesive with the team instead of falling apart after a few months. Without this role, even the best systems will quickly become outdated.
When to prioritize which direction
Prioritize the sales document library first when the sales team is duplicating old slides incorrectly to meet customer deadlines. Each deal won or lost depends on who picks the latest version.
In reality, these two tasks often need to be done in parallel during the initial phase, because sales materials must be built on the design system foundation. Doing it the other way around, creating a library of materials first and then establishing a system, means doing it twice.
Common errors in this phase
- There is a design system for the product, but marketing and sales are separate, creating two parallel standards within one company.
- The document library on the shared drive is not maintained by anyone. Old and new versions are mixed up, and sales mistakenly take the wrong ones to meet clients.
- Consider design partners as places to create each slide on demand, rather than using them to build a framework for the team to do it correctly later.
- No one owns the system after it's built. After a few months, no one updates it, and the system becomes outdated and neglected.
The reusable component system frees designers from repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on more complex problems.
Superside · Design systems for SaaS
The viewpoint of Sinh Vũ
For a growing SaaS company, Sinh Vũ acts as the system guardian, not just someone who creates slides on demand. The monthly hours in a long-term contract should be invested in significant work with the team: building and maintaining a design system that covers both products and sales documents, creating a presentation template and one-page documents for sales to assemble correctly, and coordinating requests to ensure no one deviates from the standard.
Sinh Vũ only covers the brand and identity system. Performance marketing, ad placement, and channel analysis are separate roles. If you need a comprehensive marketing director, that person should be hired internally or through an agency specializing in performance. The two roles complement each other well but cannot replace one another.
One important point: you still need an internal contact to place orders, approve priorities, and maintain coordination. Without that person, no matter how good the system is, it will go off track after a few months.
Decision checklist
Topic: SaaS technology: scaling design systems and sales materials as the team grows rapidly. Sinh Vũ guide, sinhvu.com
Select each item you find appropriate, then print or save as PDF to take with you.
If you have marked most of the signs above, this is the time to discuss in more detail. Sinh Vũ can help you review and propose a direction.
References
Superside · Design systems for SaaS; donux · Design systems that actually scale; Salesmotion · Sales operations org structure; Sinh Vũ O1 · Brand operations.
Frequently asked questions
We already have a design system for the product; do we need to create more?
The design system for products and the marketing and sales system are two different things. If the product team uses separate Figma components while the sales team pulls slides from a shared drive, those two worlds will remain disconnected. The existing system needs to be expanded so that marketing and sales can operate on the same foundation, rather than creating an additional parallel set.
Can a retainer with Sinh Vũ replace the role of a marketing director?
No. Sinh Vũ covers branding and systems: creating templates, maintaining standards, coordinating design requests. Marketing performance tasks such as running ads, channel analysis, or growth strategy are the responsibilities of the marketing director or a dedicated performance agency. These two roles complement each other and cannot replace one another.