Product & Experience · Consumer Lending
A vendor collapse left about nine months to rebuild consumer-lending servicing from scratch — under active regulatory pressure and with an organization new to integrating design. We reframed design from the program's blocker into the blueprint the build depended on, and shipped all six mission-critical features on deadline — inside a three-month design window.
The Ask
The consumer-lending transformation had hinged on a third-party vendor to re-platform and inherit out-of-the-box capabilities. When the vendor failed enterprise security and compliance vetting, "configure a proven platform" became "build a new one from scratch" — in about nine months.
The clock wasn't ambitious. It was existential. Active regulatory exposure meant unresolved issues carried penalties severe enough to take the business offline. And on top of that, the org had never integrated design into delivery — leadership assumed design could run in parallel to development, not realizing design decisions are what dev builds from.
The result: nearly five of the nine months burned in escalation, leaving three or four to design an entire servicing platform end-to-end.
The Approach
The turning point wasn't a screen; it was a sentence. Weeks of executive-level conversations reframed the story from "design is slow" to what was actually true — the program had never scoped design in. Once leadership understood that design decisions drive development, everything downstream became solvable.
With the partner team, we separated absolutely-critical from can-refresh-later. Six member- and MSR-facing servicing experiences made the cut — the set that de-risked regulatory exposure and moved the biggest business outcomes.
Instead of a waterfall, features shipped in staggered increments — a delivery model that kept the team at full capacity from day one and de-risked the fixed deadline. What normally runs 18 increments compressed to 12 without breaking quality.
Everything shipped on a stringently governed, highly accessible design system — with parity between what members see and what member-service reps see, visible status where it used to be opaque, and automation designed to remove entire categories of manual error.
"Design isn't the blocker. It's the blueprint the build depends on."
The reframe that turned five lost months into three that shipped
The Outcome
What Made It Work
Design decisions dictate development. So design goes first — as the blueprint the build depends on, not a parallel workstream that "catches up."
Members and MSRs should see and do the same things. Asymmetric tooling — where the person on the phone knows less than the person on the app — is a design failure.
Every "please call us" is a design failure to move to self-service. If a member is stuck, the design owes them a path forward — inside compliance, inside the system.
Selected Artifacts
