New working trust
Reviewing full customer flows together, instead of siloed products alone, gave every team the same view of the customer experience, sharpened week over week.
Bringing Coherence to a Company-Wide Reinvention
How I built the operating model that let 9+ teams execute against an ambitious, still-forming product vision without fragmenting.
01The Challenge
An ambitious vision arrived without an operating model to build it.
PayPal's stock surged through COVID, then settled. That swing brought new ambition for the company, and with it a new Chief Product Officer and a new Chief Design Officer. Both wanted to move the company past its identity as a digital wallet toward an ecommerce aggregator, a place where a customer's financial life and shopping life could sit together.
To set direction, the new CDO circulated six high-fidelity core screens: a polished picture of the reinvented experience, meant as provocation. Those screens were carrying a lot at once: force new thinking, stand in for a strategy, square against existing products, and lock the look and feel.
This collided with how the company read high-fidelity work. By convention, screens at that level were production-ready, with strategy, interactions, tested UX and more already vetted. When these "what if" screens reached product, engineering, and PMO without caveats, everyone reasonably assumed the thinking behind them existed, and that the design org was holding it. Because most of the design org hadn't yet seen them, we were as surprised as anyone. Momentum and expectation formed that design would carry the vision the rest of the way, but leadership, product, engineering, PMO, and compliance each had a different picture of what success looked like. The work had to hold all of them together at once. That was the challenge.
The CDO's six screens
C-suite
Product
Engineering
Designnormally the last review before engineering, skipped this time
“…wait, can we even build this?”
02The Approach
We needed a new way of working to manage this bolt from the blue.
The CDO used this as an opportunity to shake things up, so we needed to channel this provocation into coherent, reviewable, buildable work, while extending their new design language, extrapolating and hardening design patterns, and coordinating high speed and high craft work across multiple teams. I created a machine to produce the redesign, with prototyped screens as just one output of it. It came together as five moving parts, built in parallel.
1The decision spine
I worked with my up level design and product leadership to settle how reviews and decisions would be made, anchoring on a critical new structural rule: every walkthrough would start at the PayPal Dashboard and build outward. The Dashboard was a live aggregate of nearly every product, so anchoring reviews there made it the integration point for the whole strategy. The review protocol mirrored the mental model, and the design process was re-focused around it.
PayPal
Dashboard
Dashboard
Wallet
Finance
Payments
Shopping
Credit / Growth
2Our production environment: the Design Playbook
None of this could run without shared infrastructure, so we built a structured Figma workspace that worked as both a set of team sandboxes and the single design source of truth. Every component became a configurable element, and the Dashboard was built first, built to receive. We created it to allow anyone to build a new prototype using the shared source of truth, which enabled individual teams to rapidly work out experiences side by side within their product teams, and those iterations fed back into the Dashboard. It remained a single source of truth.
Wallet
teamFinance
teamPayments
teamShopping
teamCredit
teamGrowth
team
teamFinance
teamPayments
teamShopping
teamCredit
teamGrowth
team
Playbook configuration
region · account age · engagement · product options
Dashboard output
Financial snapshot
Wallet module
Finance module
Payments module
Shopping module
Credit module
Growth module
3The design system was rebuilt in-flight
All of it had to be skinned against a design system that was being rebuilt at the same time, underneath us. The five-person system team carried an enormous load, and the work moved in a tight bidirectional loop: system and application moving together, neither waiting on the other to finish.
Design System Team
- Five people translating the new look into components
→ship
←feedback
Product Design Teams
- Put components to work in real layouts, pushed them hard
4A communication lattice
Coordination on this scale doesn't happen by accident, so I built the structure for it. Everything was designed to pyramid upward, so the work rolled up cleanly enough that leadership could walk the rest of the C-suite through it on a separate cadence, without me in the room.
Weekly Chief Design Officer review
Standalone enough to walk the C-suite through
Bi-weekly manager · Weekly prototyping + design system
Clearing approvals, open questions, readiness
Daily all-team scrums · Daily in-person co-design
What's done, what's next, what's blocking
Per-team Slack · Aggregate Dashboard · Prototyping · Design system · Asana tracking
Always-on channels carrying daily reports upward
5Cross-cutting work
Across this were initiatives that cut across every team. With content strategy and brand design, we drove an illustration refresh, tracking the inventory and repository the illustration team worked against. We led the PMO's move to Asana, populating the new system from the design vantage point, a seat the org hadn't had before. Standing legal and compliance sessions kept the vision tied to regulatory reality with early, frequent input.
6
Surfaces I managed directly
Dashboard, Financial Snapshot, Wallet & Ledger, Profile, Onboarding, Growth. ~12 designers.
9
Additional product areas coordinated
Design, content, engineering, product, and research teams working across those areas.
60+
In the working group
Along with the design system team, legal & compliance partners, brand, and more.
03The Outcome
The most impactful output of this project was operational.
These new ways of working outlasted the initiative. The process got more nimble and integrated across every partner: product, engineering, project management, analytics, legal, and design.
The Design Playbook
A drag-and-drop build system anchored to the Dashboard let anyone assemble a contextually accurate page across regions, languages, account states, and user types.
However…
The aggregator vision didn't ship; the effort was overtaken by restructuring. What lasted was the operating model: the spine, the Playbook, the cadence, and the relationships.
04Hindsight
Give voice to the hard questions even while building the machine.
What I'd do differently
I should have pushed harder and earlier to make the strategy's gaps and regulatory hand waving explicit and shared, instead of letting them sit as things for design to quietly work around. The team was good at producing coherent work against a moving target, but we'd have been more effective if I'd gotten leadership to name up front what had to be true, from a regulatory and technical standpoint, for the vision to ship.