Data-Driven Lab: Senior Designer to Product Owner

I joined as a Senior Product Designer — shipping the app MVP, redesigning the website, and improving the core user flows. A few months in, the team's product manager moved on and I was asked to take the role. I said yes — a chance to grow into management without giving up design.

The team was twelve: back-end, front-end and mobile engineers, QA, business analysts and business-system analysts, a UX writer, and a UX researcher. I stayed the designer on it — everything we shipped, I still drew.

Before this role I'd never planned a sprint, scoped work with engineering, or written a Jira epic. I hired specialists well outside my own craft — BAs, QA, engineers. Eighteen months of running the team rewired how I think about building products.

The company ran multiple brands; I owned the one for a local emerging 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 local back-end didn't support everything the global product could — feature parity wasn't there yet.

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.

The web product didn't have a design system – just ad-hoc styles on top of vanilla HTML/CSS.

I designed the system from scratch — color tokens, typography, grid, and a full component library; engineering built it on Angular. Theming was baked in from day one, so new brands and new markets wouldn't mean a rewrite.

The website and dashboard ran on vanilla HTML/CSS — pages hand-rolled, no shared components, slow to ship. Rewrote the entire web product on Angular and redesigned every flow from the ground up — not ported, rebuilt.

A full app built in parallel with the web — mobile design system rebuilt, every screen redesigned, functionality extended beyond the global app.

Over eighteen months, a technically and functionally lagging product turned into a fully operational one — a mobile app, a rebuilt web dashboard, working back-office systems, and aligned communications across business, product, marketing, analytics, and the local office.

The goal I took the role for was to get the product ready to scale. The business had deliberately held back marketing spend while the product wasn't ready; once it was, the time came to scale — and a team of twelve was no longer the right shape for it. Each major flow — onboarding, KYC, billing, deposits and withdrawals — was handed to a dedicated specialised team. Management decentralised, and the Product Owner role in the form I held it was no longer needed.

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.

Running the team as PO without putting the pen down taught me to build from both sides of the table — to scope and sequence with engineering while still owning the craft. The sharpest lesson was the ending: the org shape that gets a product ready to scale is rarely the shape that scales it. Reading that moment — and handing the role over cleanly — mattered as much as the eighteen months of building.