Momentum Financial Services Group · 2025–2026
Director of Product Design

I moved product design from fragmented requests and late-stage review toward a shared operating model with clearer intake, ownership, customer evidence, decision rights, handoff standards, and product-quality controls.

The goal was to make design easier to work with, less dependent on individual relationships, and better connected to product, engineering, operations, compliance, and business priorities.

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Design work was happening, but the system around it was fragmented

The design team supported a growing financial-services ecosystem across digital, assisted, and operational channels. The problem was not a lack of work. It was a lack of shared structure around how that work entered the team, how priorities were set, where decisions were recorded, when partners needed to participate, and how quality was protected through implementation.

Requests arrived through direct messages, email, meetings, Figma comments, and individual relationships. Feedback and approvals could live somewhere different from the original request. Designers worked across different product areas with limited shared visibility. Engineering did not always have a consistent definition of development-ready design.

As the organisation and product portfolio grew, that model would increasingly depend on coordination rather than clear ownership.

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My mandate

My responsibility was to create the conditions for a small product design team to support a complex product organisation without every request, decision, quality question, or escalation depending on me personally.

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I created one operating layer for design work

The first problem I addressed was visibility.

I established a shared Product Design workflow in Asana so requests, status, ownership, dependencies, decisions, feedback, and approvals could be traced in one place. New work entered through a structured intake rather than depending on someone knowing which designer to contact.

Backlog
↓
Triage
↓
Ready to start
↓
In progress
↓
Design review
↓
Stakeholder review
↓
Building handoff
↓
Done

Blocked sits outside the normal flow when a dependency stops progress.

People no longer needed to know the design team’s internal relationships to understand where work stood or what needed to happen next.

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I stopped treating design quality as something checked at the end

Better intake alone would not solve implementation quality. I introduced clearer review and handoff expectations so product quality had checkpoints before work reached customers.

Product designers began reviewing work with each other through recurring critique. Stakeholder review became a distinct decision point rather than an informal collection of comments. Engineering teams were onboarded to work from approved Figma frames, inspect components and states directly, and keep implementation questions connected to the source.

Design QA then created a final product-quality check before release rather than assuming that functional QA alone meant the experience was ready.

Control	Purpose
Design critique	Improve judgement before stakeholder commitment
Stakeholder review	Capture the decision and material cross-functional input
Ready for Dev	Define when engineering should begin implementation
Figma Dev Mode	Give engineering direct access to design specifications and states
Design QA	Catch experience discrepancies before production

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I made customer evidence part of the operating model

I did not want design maturity to mean better internal process while teams continued making product decisions from assumptions.

We began building recurring ways to observe the experience beyond project-specific usability tests, including branch shadowing, frontline employee research, structured product research, and a repeatable FSR satisfaction programme.

The aim was to connect recurring evidence to prioritisation rather than let research disappear into individual project files.

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I separated design authority from cross-functional authority

As product design became involved in more complex and regulated work, “everyone contributes” was no longer a sufficient governance model.

I defined decision boundaries so teams could distinguish a design recommendation from a business decision, technical decision, regulatory approval, operational constraint, or brand decision.

The principle was simple: one role owns the design recommendation. Other functions contribute expertise and retain authority over the decisions they are accountable for.

Decision type	Accountable function
Product experience and interaction quality	Product Design
Product strategy, scope and commercial priorities	Product
Technical architecture and implementation	Engineering
Regulatory interpretation and approval	Compliance / Legal
Operational policies and constraints	Operations
Foundational brand strategy	Marketing

Design decisions should happen as close to the work as possible. I step in when there is unclear ownership, material customer risk, accessibility risk, compliance risk, a significant business trade-off, or unresolved cross-functional disagreement.

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The model had to work without me becoming the bottleneck

Early in the transformation, a significant amount of intake, prioritisation, review, coordination, and standards work flowed through me. That helped create structure quickly, but it was not the model I wanted to scale.

I began shifting ownership toward designers responsible for customer and operational problems rather than simply assigning work by platform familiarity. I also defined clearer role charters, decision rights, shared foundations, and specialist capability needs so more decisions could happen inside the team.

The next operating-model evolution

Director of Product Design

Experience foundations
Principal Product Designer
Dedicated Design System Engineering partner

Content and communication
Content Designer / UX Writer

Product experience
Senior Product Designer, Lending & Servicing
Product Designer, Omnichannel Experience
Product Designer, Assisted & Operational Experiences
Product Designer, Growth & Acquisition

From: “Who knows this platform?”
To: “Who owns this customer or business problem?”

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What changed

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What I learned