Founding product designer at a fintech startup that's helping homeowners manage their mortgages with confidence. At the moment, I'm thinking a lot about scaling systems and teams.
2024 — Now
New York, United States
In 2020, I joined the company pre-series A as the first member of the product team. Since then, we’ve grown a lot: 20+ product team, 300+ total employees, 250k mortgages actively serviced.
I lead product design for two teams that power Valon's core servicing functions. Both areas involve supporting complex flows across the front office, back office, and homeowner experiences:
Escrow: Manage property insurance, taxes, and mortgage insurance on all escrowed loans, to protect the interests of homeowners and mortgage investors alike.
Payments: Process 250k payments each month across 5 payment methods so that homeowners can make payments flexibly based on their preferences. Enable back office to perform payment operations like refunds, reallocations, and recasts efficiently and compliantly.
Additionally, I lead the design system, which powers all of Valon's digital and physical user experiences. With a cross-functional working group, together we've built:
Libraries for web components, notifications (mail & email), and illustrations
Documentation of components and patterns
Brand, writing, and tone guidelines
A culture of open contributions to the design system, company-wide
I enjoy collaborating with cross-functional leaders in product, engineering, data, compliance, and operations to make sure we're aligned from strategy to execution. As a design manager, I support career growth by providing actionable feedback and opportunities to learn & lead. I work closely with our Head of Design to shape our team's strategy, culture, and processes.
2022 — 2024
New York, United States
Founding designer on ValonX: Enabled Valon to begin offering mortgage origination, refinance, property insurance, and more home-related products and services. Focused on top of funnel: Created web and email marketing campaigns and intuitive flows to enable homeowners to enter the purchase process.
Built a best-in-class transfer experience: Servicing transfers are notoriously painful. We built a snappy registration process that hundreds of thousands of homeowners have used (75% registration rate, 1.5 minute average completion time). Welcoming and thoughtfully written notifications keep homeowners informed at every step of the way. AutoPay transfers.
Focused on operational efficiency, to enable scale: Select projects: agent portal that enables efficient calls, homeowner self-serve features, bulk tooling, interactive voice response (IVR) optimization, and AI-assisted call summarization. Loan count scaled by 12x and unit economics stabilized.
New York, United States
Getting from 0 to 1: Helped build the first version of the product, in partnership with seasoned industry professionals to reimagine what a servicing system can do. This helped Valon secure approval from Fannie Mae to begin servicing mortgages in less than 2 years of the company's founding, which is unheard of in the mortgage industry.
Company redesign: We realized a business need to rebrand to build homeowner trust and enable the company to scale. Our CEO tasked me with leading the project. In 3 months, I delivered a fresh company brand identity in partnership with internal and external collaborators. This included executing across a wide scope: selecting a new name company name, defining brand vs. product guidelines, updating all branded materials, and launching a new public website. Got executive buy-in and managed relationship with design agency partner (Order) to ensure alignment and efficiency.
Building the product team: Heavily involved in hiring 2 other Product Designers and 5 Product Managers.
2019 — 2020
New York, United States
At Mark43, I had the privilege of designing tools for first responders.
Owned end-to-end design of features and modules across the Records Management System (including Reports, Cases, Evidence, Mobile, and Administrator tools)
Planned, conducted, and synthesized user research
Helped shape product strategy in collaboration with cross-functional partners
Worked with 3 engineering teams and 4 product managers distributed across NYC and Toronto
2018 — 2019
New York, New York
Education
Wellesley College
Bachelor of Arts - BA
Massachusetts Institute of Technology