Enterprise Fintech · 2023–2025
Closing the Gap After Four Acquisitions
How structural coherence turned five acquired companies into one platform
5 → 1
Product experiences unified
30
Designers across 4 time zones
151M
End users impacted
72
NPS (world-class)
The Challenge
Post-acquisition, the company had five definitions of quality, five sets of assumptions about who the customer was, and five inherited ways of making decisions. Every product team was still operating with its own design system, its own research cadence, and its own definition of done. Customers saw the fragmentation before leadership did: support tickets citing inconsistency were up 40%, and Sales was losing deals because the product looked like five different companies stitched together. The design team had grown from 12 to 30, but headcount wasn't the problem. Structure was. Leadership assumed it was a design problem. It wasn't. It was a coherence problem.
Leadership assumed it was a design problem.
It wasn't.
It was a coherence problem.
The Cascade
All five failure modes from The Coherence Gap were active in this organization.
Unclear Outcomes
5 Definitions of Quality
Priority Thrash
Competing roadmaps across BUs
Collapsed Ownership
Designers waiting years to ship
Misaligned Constraints
54 button styles, 5 design systems
Process as Shield
Agency model replaced learning with ritual
The Approach
Restructured design from an agency model (separate intake process, separate sprints, random designer assignment) to strategic partnerships: each designer paired with a specific PM, with consistent ownership over a part of the user journey. Pairings balanced skills and experience. Teams moved faster with deeper context, producing work that was actually buildable and releasable.
Agency → Partners
Design model shift
Fixed a broken design-to-engineering pipeline. PMs and designers had been spending months on detailed feature designs that sat in a queue waiting for engineering prioritization. One designer told me she had been at nCino for two years and nothing she designed had been built. This was widespread: thousands of hours of work never realizing value. Six months after I took over, I led a product group through a design sprint that shipped a completely new feature and billable SKU in just over three months. Unheard of at nCino.
~3 mo
New feature to shipped SKU
One Global Design System.
Led a multi-year design system consolidation: five systems into one global standard (Figma libraries, code components, shared documentation). This was a structural intervention, not a Figma cleanup.
Stood up research operations from scratch: hired a research ops lead, partnered with Legal and Customer Success, and built a user panel from 0 to 272,000 participants. Went from ad-hoc research to running 10+ concurrent studies.
Replaced a single North Star metric with a three-metric constellation owned by dedicated leadership pods. Led the user satisfaction metric initiative.
Guided the design team from no AI strategy to building full product prototype experiences. Pushed the company from a basic 'add a chatbot' approach to a comprehensive AI implementation strategy: enhancement prompts within existing workflows, AI-enhanced content, a visual language helping users distinguish AI-generated content, and contextual integration that minimized the blank-chat-screen problem.
Before → After
Structural changes, not cosmetic ones.
Before
5 design systems
Agency model (random assignment)
0 user research panel
Years in design queue
No shared product vision
No AI design strategy
After
1 global design standard
Strategic partnerships (owned domains)
272,000-person research panel
Concept to ship in months
3-metric constellation + shared vision
Full AI product prototype strategy
The Outcome
The unified platform now serves 151 million users with a world-class NPS of 72 and 98% customer retention. The design team operates as one organization: 30+ designers with shared principles, shared systems, and a shared product vision. Concept-to-ship time went from 'years in a queue' to months. The AI design strategy positioned the product for the next generation of intelligent lending software.
“You cannot fix what you cannot see. The audit made the Coherence Gap visible. Everything that followed was structural intervention.”