Sagent
Starship Design System
A design system, and the habits to use it, for a mortgage-tech company moving from engineering-led to design-led product work.
- Year
- 2022
- We did
- UX research, product design, design system, brand identity
- Industry
- Mortgage servicing software
The ask
Sagent builds software for mortgage servicing: regulated, complex, and high stakes. Product had always been engineering-led, with little UX research and no shared design language across products. They wanted design in the room while products were being made, not added at the end.
What we built
- Starship, a custom design system: a design token framework, a reusable component library, documentation for design, development, and governance, and a contribution model so teams could extend it themselves.
- Research and prototyping workflows: user interviews and fast feedback loops in place of assumptions.
- Design reviews, training, and alignment sessions with product and engineering teams.
- A full brand identity. Sagent didn’t adopt it, but it set the visual language the product work used.
The hard part
A design system is only worth something if teams use it. Most of the work was organizational: getting engineers and product managers to bring design in earlier, and giving them a system that made the right choice the easy one.
Result
Sagent’s product teams moved from developer-led delivery to iterative, design-informed decisions, with Starship as the shared foundation.
