# Katy Ma > Design at Valon Location: New York, New York, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/katyma 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. I get excited about complex, regulated industries where there's a need for better, simpler, and more human experiences—where entering the market as an impactful new player can result in not only business impact for a single company, but influence user-focused innovation across an entire industry. The common thread in everything I do is a love for people and meaningful connection. I'm currently living in NYC with my jindo/corgi pup, Nuomi. ## Work Experience ### Staff Product Designer @ Valon Jan 2024 – Present | 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. ### Senior Product Designer @ Valon Jan 2022 – Jan 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. ### Product Designer II (Founding Product Designer) @ Valon Jan 2020 – Jan 2022 | 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. ### Product Designer II @ Mark43 Jan 2019 – Jan 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 ### Product Designer I @ Mark43 Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | New York, New York ### Co-Director @ WHACK (Wellesley College Hackathon) Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | Wellesley, MA WHACK, the Wellesley College hackathon, is a celebration of diverse identities in tech. As Co-Director, I led a team of 12 across design, engineering, social media, corporate relations, and logistics to organize a 36-hour hackathon with 300+ participants. Prior to serving as Co-Director, I led design, web development, and branding for the Spring 2017 and Fall 2017 hackathons. ### UX Designer @ MIT Media Lab Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | Cambridge, Massachusetts Working on the Civic Media group's Media Cloud, an open source platform that helps researchers, activists, and organizations track & visualize global news trends. Media Cloud is a major joint project of the MIT Center for Civic Media, and the Harvard Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society. ### UX Design Engineer Intern @ Google Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area Designed and prototyped live interaction features to empower users with opportunities for emotive self-expression and engagement with creators. Team: YouTube Live & Gaming. ### UI/UX Design Intern @ Microsoft Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | Cambridge, Massachusetts Shipped two software applications with two developer teams during 12-week internship. Led the product vision, conducted user research and testing, delivered high fidelity UI/UX designs, and demoed progress to stakeholders weekly. Followed an agile development process. ### Experience Designer at Mobile Experience Lab @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | Cambridge, Massachusetts ## Education ### Bachelor of Arts - BA in Media Arts & Sciences Wellesley College ### Cross-registered in MAS and CMS Massachusetts Institute of Technology ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/katyma --- Source: https://flows.cv/katyma JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/katyma/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-29