Founding designer at Thiel-backed SaaS fintech.
Product design
Fintech
Strategy
Company
Treasure
Role
Founding Product Designer (Sole Owner)Led product strategy, architected core flows, and managed design-to-eng handoff.
Team
CEO, CTO, Me, 2 Engineers, 1 Data Lead.
Impact
- 15x higher idle-cash returns Designed features that helped small business CFOs understand and act to improve the yield on their idle cash.
- $0 to $10M AUM Crafted the product and marketing experiences that drove Treasure's initial growth from $0 to $10M AUM.
- Top 10 category recognition Helped define an intuitive product that became a top recognized cash management platform.
THE SOLUTION
A unified financial OS
THE PROBLEM
The Business Bleed
STRATEGY
The Bottom-Up Pivot
The Bet
Leadership initially pushed for a high-touch, sales-driven onboarding flow. I advocated strictly against this, arguing that our Unit Economics (ARPU) demanded a lean, bottom-up acquisition strategy.
Methodology
To execute this pivot, I needed to master the domain to simplify it.
- Deep Dive: I completed Robert Shiller's Financial Markets course (Yale) and read standard texts on treasury management to speak the language of CFOs.
- CFO Interviews: I cold-emailed and interviewed finance leaders to map their mental models, discovering that "clarity" was valued higher than "yield."
DEFINING THE EXPERIENCE
The Hard Parts
The Friction
Moving large sums of money is terrifying. Users would abandon flows if they couldn't perfectly predict the outcome of a transfer or investment.
The Solution
I architected a "Journeys" system—linear, step-by-step flows that visualized the movement of funds before execution. Instead of a "Submit" button, we used review screens that acted as a "safety latch," giving users permission to verify every detail.
GTM & IMPLEMENTATION
Partnering with Engineering
Design to Code
I didn't just hand off Figma files. Without a formal PM, I influenced solution parameters directly in brainstorming sessions with engineering.
Designing for Feasibility: I worked with the CTO to ensure our "Journeys" model mapped 1:1 with the backend state machine, reducing edge cases and ensuring that what users saw was exactly what the system would execute.
OUTCOMES & IMPACT
From zero to scalable revenue
Results
- Business Viability: The self-serve model validated the core business hypothesis, allowing Treasure to secure its next round of funding.
- Operational Efficiency: The "Journeys" UI significantly reduced the burden on our support team, as users could self-diagnose and correct errors during the transfer process.
- Trust at Scale: We established a visual language that signaled stability to CFOs, moving the brand perception from "risky startup" to "trusted financial partner."
REFLECTION
What went wrong
The Dogfooding Gap
A critical missed opportunity was failing to create a staging environment with fake data for internal testing. While we ran external usability tests, we lacked the daily, visceral empathy that comes from "dogfooding" the product ourselves. I corrected this in my next role at JITX by enforcing rigorous internal usage protocols.