March, 2025
Scaling Design at Speed: Adopting ShadCN and Building a System for 2025
How we used open-source tooling and tight collaboration to accelerate design and engineering delivery at Veygo.
The Challenge
As we looked ahead to 2025, it became clear our existing design infrastructure wouldn’t scale with the ambitions of the business. We needed a faster, leaner, and more consistent way to build experiences across Veygo’s product ecosystem—from quoting journeys to marketing touchpoints. The design team was spending too much time duplicating effort, while engineering faced growing friction around component alignment and visual consistency.
My Role
I led the product design team in implementing a scalable, token-driven design system built on top of ShadCN—a modern open-source UI system. I worked closely with engineering stakeholders to align on structure, priorities, and the practical rollout of components across Veygo’s web and mobile experiences.
Our Approach
We divided the system into two key layers:
Foundation Design System
A central token library defining colour palettes, typography scales, font weights, spacing, sizing, and border radii, used across Veygo’s product and marketing stack. These global tokens created a single source of truth from app UI to landing pages.UI Component System
Built with ShadCN + Storybook, this housed our reusable, accessible UI components. It was tailored for web and mobile parity, giving designers and engineers shared building blocks and smoother handoff across journeys.
I helped create the initial component library structure, mapped it to our quoting and policy management flows, and ensured Storybook served as a living reference for engineers.
How We Worked
Ran weekly syncs and async audits with engineers to ensure alignment and identify friction early.
Introduced design tokens as a foundation-first mindset—educating the team on how these unlock faster scaling.
Facilitated component prioritisation workshops to sequence which UI elements we needed first based on roadmap velocity.
Used Figma libraries + Storybook in tandem to ensure visual accuracy and reduce duplication across teams.
The Impact
By combining ShadCN’s flexibility with clear system architecture and tight stakeholder collaboration, we significantly sped up our quoting redesign rollout.
✅ Early outcomes:
Cut time-to-implementation by ~30% on new quoting screens
Improved visual consistency across web/app experiences
Reduced QA/design-review cycles by aligning tokens and variants up-front
