Developing a product design team and processes leading to award winning solutions
Product Design Lead - 2019 to 2024
Overview
I helped Corpay Cross-Border Payments build their design team from a single designer (me), to a team of five with a focus on user research and innovative design. My goal was to bring user centred design practices to a growing product team, and to improve both our internal operations systems and external client facing products. This led to dramatic customer retention and growth, as well as an award winning customer experience including Fintech Company of the Year 2024.
Throughout, I’ve helped transform existing services and features into usable and desirable experiences. Our internal operations teams have reduced time to task completion, and our customers have never had more insight into their international payments.
Opportunity
Corpay’s b2b payment solutions services 3.3+ million payments annually, in 200+ countries, for 25,000+ customers. Despite being a global leader in payments, their internal operations and product development process was inefficient. Different user needs weren’t being met, and their internal system was in dire need of an update.
Focusing on these problems led to the development of features including custom reports, payment tracking, virtual currency accounts, support for multiple languages, a working FAQ and help process, and streamlined internal systems.
Corpay recognized that investing in a strong design process and UX was a priority, and we built a global product team that facilitated creativity and collaboration.
Process
With a global and partially remote team, it can be difficult to collaborate on features and design projects. Also, our main source of customer knowledge and feedback came from our account managers and sales teams leading to a biased product priority system. I began by spearheading adoption of multiple digital tools such as Miro for remote team collaboration, Heap for user analytics and statistics, and Maze for user research and feedback. Being a finance neophyte, I also took time to shadow our operations teams and learn more about the intricacies of b2b payments.
Early on we found a say-do gap in our studies. Clients would say that reporting and receipts were a priority for their organization, but our reports page was rarely touched. Through interviews and on site visits, we learned that even though we offered a service that matched our client’s needs, most businesses will fall back on internal processes rather than incorporate new features that didn’t quite fit. This told us that we needed a more flexible solution, one that fit into a variety of processes and supported multiple file types and data structures.
The findings from these studies were captured and presented, along with a custom reporting feature set designed and ready to implement. I also brought together an interdisciplinary “Innovation Team” on a quarterly basis to review our customer analytics, survey feedback, and to mobilize to tackle shared problems.
Results
Use of our reporting feature rose from 1.03% of active users to 16.8%. Our Innovation team discovered SWIFT’s new payment tracking feature set that we could utilize both for internal payment tracking and client facing payment updates, and how we could utilize it across all four of our organization’s platforms.
