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Best Talk Finalist

Prioritizing Design Systems

Alexander Fandén

A summary of the talk

Alexander Fandén shares his real-world journey leading the Agoda Design System (ADS) through explosive growth, expanding to support over 60 product teams and 1,600+ designers and engineers, while delivering more than 100 A/B tests weekly across four platforms. Despite achieving near-100% adoption, his team faced a familiar challenge: how to manage escalating demand and conflicting requests effectively.

To address this, the ADS team introduced a structured request lifecycle using a dedicated Jira board. All incoming requests, whether for new components, visual assets, design tokens, or tooling enhancements, are logged there. The process includes stages of review, prioritization, grooming, and ultimately assignment either to the core design system team or contributors as appropriate.

This clear, transparent, and replicable framework helped restore alignment and build trust with stakeholders, mitigating bottlenecks and clarifying expectations. The methodology Fandén lays out offers a scalable blueprint for design system teams grappling with similar pressures.

Highlight

“By focusing on scalability and anticipating future needs, you’ve crafted a process that’s resilient enough to evolve alongside Agoda's growth. This reflects not only strategic insight but a deep understanding of the company’s goals.” - Into DS attendee

Watch the video

Timeline

  1. Nominations will be open from Tuesday 13 May. If you have any questions about the nomination process, then check out the FAQs, or if your question isn't answered, please get in touch at community@zeroheight.com

    13 May, 2025

  2. Once the nominations are closed, we'll be collating the longlist and working through it to determine a shortlist. The shortlist will be determined by the team at zeroheight, and will be based on uniform judging criteria (which we will share in a month or two). With the shortlist creation, we aim to remove as much bias as possible and give everyone a fair chance across the board.

    22 August, 2025

  3. In September, the shortlist will be announced, including public voting! We'll notify all folks as to whether they made the shortlist. The judges will then individually judge each shortlisted entry. We'll also have public voting on each category live on the site!

    15 September, 2025

  4. Once all the judges and public votes are counted, we'll then be able to determine the winner for each category, based off a weighted compilation of votes.

    3 November, 2025

  5. In December, we'll gather the community together at an event in London to announce the winners live. We'll also be live-streaming the ceremony for those who can't make it. The live event will be invite only, but we'll offer the community a chance to apply for a ticket later in the year! We'll also post the results to the zeroheight site the day after the event.

    December 2025 (TBA)

Past Winners