Wallapop is a C2C marketplace that connects buyers and sellers across mobile and web platforms. Their design team shapes the end-to-end customer journey, from seller onboarding and listing creation to checkout, logistics, and post-purchase experiences.
After a team restructuring, Wallapop’s product designers needed a clearer understanding of how to work within the design system—and the skills to support new responsibilities.
To address this, Wallapop partnered with Designlab on a customized Figma training program to improve designers’ proficiency with Figma and help them work more confidently and efficiently as a team.
The result: designers are now contributing more autonomously, collaborating more effectively across teams, and taking greater ownership of shared components.
Challenge
Wallapop’s designers are embedded across multiple product teams covering different parts of the marketplace experience, including buyer flows, seller tools, and transaction management.
While this structure enables designers to specialize in their areas, it also creates silos. The design system helps unify these efforts—but as the org structure changed and headcount decreased, maintaining it fell to just a few people.
“We were trying a decentralized model where designers could prepare their own documentation and specs for contributions to the system,” shared Abel Bueno, Design Systems Lead at Wallapop. “[But there was] uncertainty that they were doing the right things in Figma and not just destroying the system.”
Due to their varying levels of proficiency in Figma, designers weren’t always confident deciding when to create new components versus reusing existing ones. Branching, versioning, merging, and publishing workflows created friction, and documentation quality was inconsistent.
A formal, structured training with Designlab was intended to raise the designers’ overall Figma skills and establish a shared approach for working with their unique design system.
Solution
Wallapop partnered with Designlab on a custom team Figma training program designed specifically around the team’s workflows and design system.
Led by Designlab mentor and Figma expert Blake Arnsdorff, the training combined short lectures, live demos, and hands-on exercises. Using examples from Wallapop’s own design system, the sessions focused on several areas:
- Creating and refining components efficiently in Figma while maintaining clarity, reusability, and manageable variant structures
- Understanding when to create, update, or reuse components
- Managing branching, version control, and publishing workflows
- Practicing file hygiene and naming conventions for easier navigation and maintenance
- Reviewing contributions and using peer-to-peer feedback to maintain quality and support collaboration
As part of a holistic effort, Wallapop also introduced updated documentation and contribution processes to support designers alongside the Figma training.
By strengthening the team’s Figma skills and cementing best practices, the training helped designers feel more comfortable working within the system. For Wallapop, the training also helped reinforce a crucial mindset shift: contributing to the design system is a shared responsibility.
“There's this common sense of ownership of the components and the contributions that didn't exist previously,” Abel shared.
Key Outcomes
Designers Have More Autonomy
Following the training with Designlab, Wallapop designers are now making more independent decisions in the earliest stages of the contribution process—particularly in determining whether something should be a new component, an iteration, or a reuse case.
Contributions can now move from decision-making to review and merge with less reliance on design system leads.
“The decision-making tree [has] improved after the training. The process of reviewing and merging into our design system is happening in a more autonomous way.”
More Ownership and Accountability
Another major shift has been a growing sense of ownership among designers. Whereas the design system was previously maintained by a small group, designers now see contributing to it as part of their role.
Designers are also showing more interest in improving documentation and workflows themselves. During recent OKR discussions, team members began to propose their own ideas for refining design system documentation and processes.
There's this common sense of ownership of the components and the contributions that didn't exist previously.
Better Collaboration Across Product Teams
Because designers now share a stronger understanding of how the system works, teams across Wallapop’s product areas are collaborating more effectively around shared components.
The design system continues to function not only as a library of reusable components but also as a bridge between teams.
We see the design system not only as a tool for reusability, but also as a wall breaker between the teams.
A More Empowered Team
In retrospective discussions, designers reported appreciating the autonomy and flexibility to build and edit components themselves. This distributes authority across the product team and helps designers move faster.
While the team continues to iterate on communication channels and feedback guidelines, overall sentiment points to the new model becoming more effective and scalable over time.
“So far, we've seen that the team is happier and more productive, and the training supported this.”
Conclusion
For Wallapop, increasing the team’s proficiency in Figma was an important step toward improving and scaling their design system.
By investing in team training, the company helped designers build the skills and confidence to own and contribute to product workflows. Just as importantly, the training helped align the design system with the realities of a leaner team—making it possible for more designers to participate in maintaining design system health and scalability.
While the transition to a more distributed model is still evolving, the results are already visible: designers are more autonomous, more collaborative, and more invested in maintaining the system together.
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