The team is expanding rapidly: prioritize the system before everything drifts.

After the funding round, the team grew from ten to thirty people in six months. This meant adding three or four departments, each creating materials in their own way. Sales had their own presentation deck, marketing had their own landing pages, and recruitment had their own posters. From the outside, the brand looked like it belonged to three different companies. This is not the fault of the new employees. This is a failure of the system that has not kept 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.

• A design system that encompasses both products and marketing. Many companies have a design system for product interfaces but leave marketing and sales out. The result is two disconnected worlds: the frontend engineer's components are one style, while the sales presentation templates are another. A true design system must allow product, marketing, and brand to operate on a unified foundation.
• A standardized, reusable sales collateral library. Presentation decks, one-page documents, case studies by customer industry. The goal is to help new salespeople ramp up faster and avoid deviating from the standards when closing deals.
• The role of coordinating requests (DesignOps). This person manages the flow of design requests from various departments. They guide decision-making when conflicts arise. They ensure that the larger system stays intact with the team instead of falling apart after a few months. Without this role, no matter how good the system is, it will quickly become outdated.

When to prioritize which direction

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.
• Viewing design partners as a resource to create each presentation on demand, rather than using them to build templates for the team to create correctly in the future.
• 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

With the SaaS company rapidly expanding, Sinh Vũ stepped in as the system guardian, not just someone to create each presentation on demand. The monthly budget in the long-term contract should be invested in significant projects with the team. This includes building and maintaining a design system that covers both products and sales materials. It involves creating a template for presentation decks and one-page documents so that sales can assemble them correctly. It also means coordinating requests to ensure no one deviates from the standards.

Sinh Vũ only handles the brand and system. Performance marketing, running ads, and channel analysis are different roles. If you need a comprehensive marketing director, that is someone to hire internally or engage a specialized performance unit. The two roles complement each other well, but cannot substitute for 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.

This article is for reference. The scope, pricing, and specific commitments of Sinh Vũ are detailed in the proposal and signed contract.