Señors at Scale - Software Engineering & Tech Leadership · Dan Neciu

Design System at Scale with Stefano Magni, Tech Lead at Preply

·1 hr 4 min·4 clips

"Your career depends on three things: your skills, your reputation, your network."

Stefano starts with a blunt point: a career depends on skills, reputation, and network. He says he used to focus mostly on skills. Then that changed. He decided that if he wanted more from his career, his work had to be public. That leads into the design system story. At Preply, the team built a metric called visual coverage. The goal was to measure how much the design system actually affected what users saw on real pages. They did it by checking page screenshots and coloring the parts that came from design system components. That gave them a dashboard with page-level data. It also made the system visible in a way people across the company could understand. From there, the team moved into a major rebrand. They started with the most important pages. Then the work spread. By the end, they were rebranding 70 percent of the whole company. That pulled frontenders, designers, and managers into one shared operating mode. Stefano describes it as a 60-person effort. The pace created pressure. The team needed a lot of new components fast. There was not always time to design each one perfectly. So they chose speed and shipped components based on Radix UI. He is direct about the cost of that choice. The team knowingly created technical debt. Some of it is still there two years later. Even so, the rebrand shipped in October. The company turned pink, and the project landed. After that, Stefano stayed on the design system side. A new design system team had to be formed from scratch. He describes it as a much smaller group than the rebrand crew. They also had to fit the design system into how Preply actually works. That matters because Preply is heavily data-driven and experiment-based. He says the team is still defining the process. The inherited design system was well grown, but it was also closed off. It did not allow much customization. That does not fit Preply well. The team is now trying to build a system that serves designers and developers without boxing them in. The conversation keeps coming back to practical tradeoffs. How much structure do you want. How much flexibility does the company need. What do you optimize for when the business wants to test and adjust quickly. Stefano's answers stay grounded in the day-to-day reality of building at scale. He keeps bringing the discussion back to how teams actually work. That makes the episode useful for people who build design systems in real companies, not just in idealized examples.

As heard by us

A grounded look at design systems, scale, and the career costs of staying invisible.

Stefano Magni treats design systems as company work, not just tooling. He links skill with reputation and network, and the account makes that case without overreaching.

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Why you'd press play

You want the design system story behind a real rebrand at scale.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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