Data-Driven Lab: Senior Designer to Product Owner
Context
I joined as a Senior Product Designer — shipping the app MVP, redesigning the website, and improving the core user flows. Then came a round of layoffs. Our team lost its product manager, and I was asked to take the role. I said yes — it looked like a good chance to grow into management without giving up design.
The team was twelve: four back-end engineers, two front-end engineers, two to four QA engineers across the year, business analysts, a UX writer, a UX researcher, two to four mobile engineers, and business-system analysts. I stayed the designer on the team — everything we shipped, I still drew.
Before this role I'd never planned a sprint, never scoped work with engineering, never written a Jira epic. I hired specialists well outside my own craft — BAs, QA, engineers. Eighteen months of running the team rewired how I thought about building products.
Problem
The company ran multiple brands. I owned the one for the local Indonesian market. A global brand on the same parent stack had just shipped a new mobile app — we took it as the reference for ours. The catch: the Indonesian back-end didn't support everything the global product could do. Our services had started as forks and had drifted far enough apart that they no longer interoperated.
Beyond the back-end, almost every core flow differed from global — registration, onboarding, KYC, funding, deposits, withdrawals, tradable assets. In effect, we'd inherited the shell and had to rewrite everything inside it.
What we did
Design system: built from zero
The web product didn't have a design system – just ad-hoc styles on top of vanilla HTML/CSS.
We built one from scratch on Angular: color tokens, typography, grid, and a full component library. Theming was baked in from day one, so new brands and new markets wouldn't mean a rewrite.
Result
A single source of truth for the web product, ready to carry new brands without branching.
Web: full rebuild on Angular
The website and dashboard ran on vanilla HTML/CSS – pages hand-rolled, no shared components, slow to ship. We rewrote the entire web product on Angular and redesigned every flow from the ground up – not ported, rebuilt.
Website. New visual language, rebuilt homepage, redesigned marketing pages.
Registration. Trimmed steps and fields. Added Google / Facebook sign-in and WhatsApp OTP verification.
KYC. A 15-page form mandated by OJK. Cut the steps, added liveness checks and a "why we're asking" note on every field, and enabled camera capture of ID – photos parsed against government registries, form pre-filled automatically.
Deposits and withdrawals. Redesigned flows, added USD deposits alongside IDR — mattered for users whose trading accounts were in USD but who funded from IDR bank accounts.
Dashboard. Home, profile, operations history, every inner section — a fully rebuilt web dashboard.
Result
Web product fully on Angular — every flow redesigned end-to-end.
Mobile app
A full app built in parallel with the web — mobile design system rebuilt, every screen redesigned, functionality extended beyond the global app.
Registration and KYC. OTP-verified sign-up; full KYC questionnaire adapted for mobile.
Deposits and withdrawals. Local payment methods, different from the global app.
Theming and localisation. Feature-toggle system for theming, with copy managed through Crowdin.
Result
Launched 15 August 2024. 20K+ downloads, 11% of active audience, 35% of product revenue.
Result
Over eighteen months, a technically and functionally lagging product turned into a fully operational one — with a mobile app, a rebuilt web dashboard, working back-office systems, and aligned communications between business, product, marketing, analytics, and the Indonesian office.
The goal I took the role for was to get the product ready to scale. The business had deliberately held back on marketing spend while the product wasn't ready; once it was, the time came to scale. A team of twelve wasn't the right shape for it anymore. Each major flow — onboarding, KYC, billing, deposits and withdrawals — was handed to a dedicated specialised team. Management decentralised, and the Product Owner role on this particular product was no longer needed in the form I held it.
I handed over the targets and went back into design — this time as a Lead Designer, working across the company's other products, mentoring and growing the designers around me.