From Dev-First to Design-Led: Building a Scalable Design System and a Culture of User-Centered Innovation

Background

Sagent operates within one of the most complex, regulated, and high-stakes industries in fintech: mortgage servicing. With multiple digital products across a wide range of customer and enterprise needs, Sagent required both a strategic brand evolution and a scalable product design infrastructure. They approached La Visual to bring clarity to their brand positioning, unify design practices across teams, and implement a systemized way to deliver more user-centered experiences—faster and with greater consistency.

Challenge

Sagent’s product development had historically been engineering-led, with limited infrastructure for UX research, design consistency, or visual brand alignment across platforms. As the company grew and evolved, it became clear that a cohesive design strategy—anchored in user data—was essential to stay competitive and reduce friction across the product lifecycle.

We were tasked with:

• Creating a scalable brand identity and system
• Establishing repeatable UX research and product design workflows
• Helping shift the internal mindset from dev-first to design-integrated
• Building the tools, language, and processes to empower cross-functional collaboration at scale

Approach

We engaged with Sagent through a holistic and multi-phase process, beginning with deep discovery and ending with the delivery of a comprehensive design system and operational model for internal teams.

Brand Illumination & Strategy
We began by conducting extensive stakeholder interviews, audience segmentation, and competitive analysis to clarify Sagent’s strategic positioning. These insights fueled the development of messaging frameworks and a brand architecture designed to unify and differentiate their products.

Visual Identity & Guidelines
A new brand identity system was created, complete with logo design, color theory, typography, and usage guidelines. While this new identity was not ultimately implemented, the process provided essential clarity for future design work and informed system-wide visual language.

UX Research & Product Strategy
Our team embedded with internal stakeholders to lead user interviews, validate product assumptions, and establish a consistent approach to rapid prototyping and feedback loops. This shifted product teams away from assumption-based design and toward user-informed iteration.

Starship Design System
To operationalize design at scale, we built a custom design system called Starship. This included:

• A full design token framework
• A reusable component library
• Contribution models for team scaling
• Robust documentation for design, development, and governance

We treated Starship not as a static asset, but as a living, evolving tool designed to support product teams with speed, clarity, and consistency.

Organizational Transformation
Through consistent collaboration, design reviews, training, and alignment sessions, we helped reposition design as a strategic asset inside Sagent. This wasn’t just a design system rollout—it was a design culture rollout. Teams began to ask better questions, prioritize user needs earlier, and see design as essential to velocity and product success.

Solution

Even without launching the new visual identity, the engagement delivered meaningful, measurable change:

• A unified product design system that scales across platforms and teams
• Repeatable UX workflows rooted in research and validation
• Design tokens and components that shorten build time and reduce tech debt
• Cross-functional collaboration models that aligned product, design, and engineering
• A cultural shift from dev-led to user-centered delivery

This foundation enabled Sagent to move faster, ship smarter, and build with purpose—anchored in the needs of their users.

Key Takeaways

• Design Systems Are Organizational Systems
  Starship became more than a toolkit—it became a blueprint for how design works at Sagent.
• Identity Is More Than a Logo
  Even though the final identity wasn’t adopted, the strategic foundation continues to drive consistency, alignment, and product clarity.
• Design Culture = Business Value
  The long-term impact of the engagement wasn’t just visual—it was operational. By empowering teams to lead with research and design, we helped Sagent deliver better solutions to real user problems, faster.

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