Three broad strategies to driving adoption of your design system in an existing product. This often presents a different challenge to starting from the ground up, as you're trying to actively replace code at rest too.
Blow it up The classic 'big bang', change everything at once. Usually doesn't work in a similar vein to other 'big bang' approaches: risk is high, code gets out of sync, etc.
Ship of Thesus Consistent specific replacements over time. Swap all components for newer components gradually. Hard for big breakthroughs and is quite time consuming. Necessitates having 1:1 swaps as anything that doesn't fit into your new design system presents problems. Also increases inconsistency.
Land & Expand As your customer uses the product, you add more value and slowly expand over time. Akin to a scoped version of a 'big bang', you redesign by a section, not by a component. Helps you test things end-to-end in a controlled environment. Over time, your scope expands until you're consistently changing sections of the existing product.
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