Happy Money

During my tenure at Happy Money, I joined at a pivotal moment as the company was transforming from a focused loan provider into a comprehensive financial solutions platform. Initially hired as a Senior Product Designer, I quickly advanced to Design Manager, where I built and led the 4 person product design and research team. In this role, I spearheaded the experience strategy for our new banking solutions while also supporting company through a significant brand evolution.

Team Success

The primary focus of my first 6 months was to get our newly formed design team up and running. I spent that time designing leveling and career paths that aligned with the company values and aligning personal career goals with company expectations to ensure all present and future designers understood how their contributions right in.

Culture and "process"

Once we felt aligned on our individual expectations, I worked with the team to create process and a design culture of love, trust, and hustle. This included:

• Developing research strategies
• Developing clear design process guide rails that did not feel constrained to individuals' natural process nor the needs/size of a project
• Setting up critiques, instilling good feedback habits and mechanisms, continuous learning loops, and working with our brand team and UI Engineers.

As a people manager of 4, I set my team up on a quarterly goal cycle, conducted 1:1s weekly, and wrote, as well as delivered, performance reviews. The heart of my work is to serve as an advocate for the team's health, happiness, and growth.

Product offering expansion

Along with the development of our new brand strategy, we were working and researching how to expand our products and services with savings accounts and debit accounts to complement Payoff, our flagship loan product.

I led the initial design investigation — developing research plans and tests and gaining an understanding of what people really need from financial products that their current institutions did not provide.

Our initial beta release focused on using predictive financial projections to keep customers in the green, as well as unique savings algorithms personalized to a customer's finances.

Setting a future forward vision

Most banking products, online or otherwise, share the same sets of core features. Setting up a relationship with a bank is an investment, and convincing people to switch can be difficult. As a service, we had to figure out how to play to our unique advantages to create compelling experiences that other services didn't offer. We turned to our research on people in stressed financial situations looking for a way out. What we heard about their needs turned out to be quite universal among them:

• Speak to me like a human being
• Invest in a relationship with me, not just a transaction
• Help me see a way out
• Come up with a plan for me that fits my situation, and I'll follow
• Reflect on my behaviors and show me progress (I can't always see the positive in the day-to-day)

The resulting output of my work was a strategy and vision around interactive conversational design focused on building a relationship with our customers and engaging them with their finances in unique but familiar ways.