XP PRODUCT DESIGN LEAD
XP inc is the first "Brazilian unicorn", one of the biggest independent investment broker in Brazil, and in 2020 became a bank.
Project Details
Role: Product Design Lead
Company: XP inc
Year: 2021 - 2022
CHALLENGE
In 2021 I became a Product Design Lead at XP inc and received the challenge to lead a team of 13 designers of the Financial Services Tribe that was later divided into four different Business Units since it got too big: Credit BU, Guaranty BU, PJ BU ( bank and broker for Business) and Exchange BU. Since the business units develop different products, there were also different challenges for each of them, but they had one thing in common, the squads attend four different channels for each product: the mobile app, website, intern tool for the back office to use and the inter tool for the assessors. So we worked with three different client segments, the assessors, the product team, and the final client.
Once I first assumed the product design lead position there were only three designers to attend to all these product backlogs, so I needed to not only have hands-on product deliveries but also recruit and train more than 10 product designers for my team. For that, I needed to understand each product moment and needed to match the designer's expertise and seniority to the product challenge better. I also wanted to make sure that I was hiring a diverse team, with people that I could help develop and that had a good culture match with the company moment. In the end, my team was formed by 2 interface designers, 1 research designer, and 10 UX designers. Most of them were mentored by me or already had a hybrid profile to participate in almost all stages of product creation.
SCOPE
- Recruit and mentor product designers
- Participate in strategic decision-making with other leaders from the tribe (GPMs and Teach Leaders)
- Help the team with product design outputs
- Align each product backlog with the product managers
- Find synergy between the backlogs and optimize processes
- Lead discoveries and create an interface and flows outputs
- Develop the product design specialty with other Product Design Leaders and Managers
- Analyze the design budget and scalability with the business unit leaders
- Define each business unit and specific product, OKR, and follow-up metrics.
10
Product Designers hired
13
Product Designers on the team
4
Business Units
Main Product Squads and Projects
XP Business Account Products
This team had the scope to create an XP bank account experience for other businesses, so all the payment methods, loans, and Investment account. For 2021, the biggest output was the discovery for creating the bank account (a new product at XP Inc) and the redesign of the mobile app to differentiate the user experience from normal users to business accounts. Since we didn’t have a big client base and recruiting companies for user testing is more complicated than recruiting other kinds of clients, our first strategy was to interview the assessors that attend those businesses and in the end, those assessors make the bridge between our product design team and the final clients.
The main output of this discovery was the mapping of one big risk we didn’t know: the fact that it is almost impossible to map user personas on this segment (a project that was already prioritized and needed to be revised). That’s because the users of our applications vary depending on the company’s market segment, size, internal processes, and culture. Because of that, we could change our backlog in time and prioritize our CPF login and ACL to better personalize our applications depending on our user company’s needs. We also decided to refine our internal processes with the User Research Ops team to better attend the future processes, organizing the CRM base to separate clients in a more dynamic way, helping us to contact them for testing and, since most of the business accounts users don’t accept doing interviews, prepare our platform to do more A/B tests and features rollouts in separated per users profiles to help us analyze data mitigating the risk.
Real Estate Financing
XP was starting to build its Real Estate Financing product and squad so, even before hiring developers and expanding the technology team, we made a discovery to better understand the better strategy and partnerships we could have to create the product. This discovery helped us know more not only about our prospective clients’ profile and their needs, but also gave us visibility into technical risks we had and how to mitigate them.
The product design team also helped analyze 3 different partners' tools and their usability and integration, changing the strategy of the product while prioritizing the best experience and scalability in the medium/ long term. Since Real Estate financing is a complex product and is related to different strategies depending on the user's needs (realizing the dream of buying a house or just buying a house for investment purposes) we created an omnichannel experience flow to attend clients in a personalized way and optimize internal costs.
In 2022, the year that I left XP - the product is being offered to a specific profile and number of clients since the Brazilian market changed a lot with the floating inflation and SELIC.
IAXP - Investimento Ampliado XP
This was one of the more dynamic products in the Credit business unit since it is directly related to the user investment strategy, but is classified as a credit product. The main challenges were related to how to better integrate this product into the investments flow, making sure we were filtering the client base correctly since it is a product that increases the risk of the client's investment portfolio. Also, the strategies of use of this product changed depending on the Brazilian market and we needed to guide our clients making sure they were using it correctly, and respecting their risk profile and assets.
This product's main strategy is to be used as a credit when: the user has a long-term investment quote and needs the money, so XP gives the user the money in advance. Another strategy is when the user sees an investment opportunity, but doesn't have the money to invest right away, so XP lends the amount so the user can catch the opportunity.
This was also one of the products that we needed to deal with two different final clients, the investors and the investment assessors team since our clients were usually assisted by them. We needed to create our internal system to make it easier for the assessors' team to simulate different possibilities of investment integrating the IAXP strategy in order to integrate the product into the client's assets and risk points. Also, since the IAXP is integrated with two different product categories we needed to make sure that the assessors could easily analyze the product in the credit points and investments interface.
Guarantee Consulting
Since most of the bank XP products have a strategy that involves the user investments as a collateral guarantee source, we needed to make sure that different products were not using the same asset as a guarantee and, since the collateral “blocks” those assets, that we were not creating problems for our user's investment strategy.
Teaching our users about how to invest is already a complex experience, adding this variable might turn this process more complex, so that was the main challenge of this project. Since usually, the clients who had access to the bank products had a higher volume of investments, we decided to create a tool to help our internal team to do the right advisory for those clients. The internal tool should be replicated to the client's portal, but only after being tested with the internal team to make sure the complex information was intuitive and wouldn’t lead our users to wrong conclusions.
The tool is connected to all product systems and shows the amount of money that is not blocked by collateral, the type of investment each product accepts as collateral and why, the possibility to change the asset related to a specific guarantee, and warnings to help the user better plan their investment strategy, risk, and duration.
After researching and analyzing the data we also needed to create some tasks to englobe each product backlog, changing some systems information, how the product explains the strategy for the clients and how each product shows the collateral/ clean credit limit strategy since some of them englobe both.
In addition to that, this team was also responsible to build the internal tool to release credit scores for our clients and to analyze the credit risk.
Credit with Investment as a Guarantee
Since XP was originally a broker and not a bank most of the bank product strategies were related to the user's assets. In this case, the logic of the product was to give financial liquidity to the clients taking their investments as a guarantee and, since the risk of the credit was shared, offer better interest rates. This was the first credit product to be integrated into the XP mobile app and because of that, this initiative needed not only to build the hiring and management flow on the platform but also think of how to integrate the new bank strategies into the global navigation of the app and consequently stimulate new discussions about the role business strategy and integration.
A full discovery was made and helped the PM to prioritize each feature and define the product MVP, the discovery also was extended to tests related to the user intuitive navigation of the mobile app, which led the design team to create a new project fully focused on the redesign of the global navigation.
At this project, we also pilot the new user journey model in partnership with the research ops team. The main goal was to create a pattern model of blueprints and user flows so we could connect initiatives and insights between business units and products with the user in focus.
Currency exchange
XP was developing another new product, and for that, we needed to create, not only the final client mobile app experience but the internal tools to manage the product and for the assessors who would help clients doing the currency exchange. This was one of our most complex products, not because of the product strategy, but because the processes involved in building and offering it to the clients were analogical and the team was not working on the agile method yet, so we needed to build the product while teaching and training the product team how to work and prioritize on a business unit method.
We mapped the internal processes and prioritized the improvements taking into consideration the risk involved in the manual process and the time it would take to deliver, so we could increase the number of clients we were offering the service to without overloading our team and systems.
Business Units
With the number of products, subjects, and the size of the team increasing rapidly we decided to separate the Tribe into three different business units. I helped plan the strategies, OKRs, budget, priorities, and team sizes and keep leading the three business units until the end of the year so we could prioritize our budget to increase the engineering team instead of hiring new design leads. At the end of this period, I interviewed and hired two other design leads for the PJ and Guarantee business units and, since I was leaving XP, also prepared one of the seniors of my team to substitute me as the design lead of the Credit business unit.
Leadership and mentoring results
4
Team members promoted
2
Team members with scope expansion
3
new BUs created
6
new products launched in 2021
TOP
Performance Product Design Leader