The problem
The company wanted a point of view on how people would move money through a bank-owned platform over the next five years. Not a feature, a direction. The work was greenfield and high stakes: leadership needed something concrete enough to invest behind. It also ran without a dedicated product owner or product manager, so the requirements, the alignment, and the momentum had to come from the design work itself.
My role
I co-led the consumer phase as the sole senior designer, working alongside staff-level researchers and designers. That was really two jobs at once. The design job was holding the quality bar across a multi-designer sprint and keeping the concepts consistent enough to test as one set. The other was the product work no one else was there to do: I framed the questions, sequenced the phases, and kept stakeholders aligned.
How the work moved
I started with the competition. Across six core money-movement use cases, I analyzed more than fifty products to find the patterns worth keeping and the gaps worth owning.
Then two weeks of concept sprints. I drove the team to more than seventy low-fidelity mobile concepts, holding a consistent level of fidelity and visual language so they could be tested as one body of work rather than a patchwork. We put those concepts in front of real users. After the interviews, I organized the feedback so the team could synthesize fast, which is where the MVP features and the winning concepts fell out. I refined the set to fifty-six screens, built the strongest flows into a prototype, and ran a formal usability round with fifteen participants across the core money-movement scenarios. Those findings went back into the work before the team built and co-presented the vision deck to senior leadership.
Working without a product manager
The hardest part was not the design. It was the absence of a product owner. I worked through unclear requirements, kept stakeholders aligned across time zones, and held the quality bar under deadlines that did not move. The design itself did the aligning: I shared it early and in progress, so the direction stayed legible to everyone who had to invest in it.
Outcome
The consumer vision landed as an MVP direction leadership could explore and back, and the research readout stayed in use on the payments work that followed. More than the artifact, the work earned design a seat in a space that had none, early enough to shape where the money went.