Mission Lane - Design Management Portfolio

At Mission Lane, I was Senior Product Design Manager with a team of 4 designers reporting to me. I was also focused on helping create their design system, hire new designers, create and sync product processes with design, and work on formulating their Product Ecosystem

Mission Lane helps people in need get credit so they can build up their financial situation to put themselves in a better position financially

My team

At Mission Lane, I had the opportunity to manage and work with some of the most inspiring designers. I was helping manage the core Credit team. This was the team that was responsible for our core products and kept the company on its feet.

Mission Lane Ecosystem

Mission Lane has a lot of products outside of their core credit card product. I was hired to help build a team around this idea of creating a Mission Lane “ecosystem”. Essentially, the core problem was to figure out how all of our products intersected with one another and how we can elevate our customers experience so that they felt that every product was a Mission Lane product rather than completely separate experiences.

The biggest question we were trying to answer was whether or not we build a super app versus working with multiple separate apps.

My role

My role was helping product and engineering stakeholders define strategy around what our ecosystem means to the company and work with my partners in helping create vision, strategy, and a process around the work moving forward. In addition, I was helping mentor and coach our designers while helping partners understand resourcing needs.

Why was this important?

This initiative really impacted the way all of our teams would work together. It impacted the future and vision of our product and would lead us from an unclear state of our products as a whole toa place where everyone knew what our vision was.

This would also impact the way that designers and developers worked moving forward. Part of my job was to hire and build a design system team as well.

This initiative also led to an entirely new process change throughout our organization where Product, Design, and Engineering would work together to think through the roadmap and future business opportunities.

My approach

I worked with our key business stakeholders to understand what our business mission was. The mission was to help our customers get the financial help they needed in order to get out of their financial rut. And by doing so, we would encourage our customers to use our multiple product offerings.

Understand business requirements

Created a roadmap with product partners

We didn’t have a strong product team at Mission Lane. A lot of them came from Capital One and needed help working with design and engineerings specifically when it came to planning. I helped them create some product artifacts such as a POA board (using Asana) and created a template for a PRD (product requirements document).

We needed to do a lot of research into how our existing customers used our apps and to really truly understand whether or not they had any hunger to leave the core experience and try our other Mission Lane offerings. Our product teams weren’t working with researchers often, and helped Product understand how this relationship can work.

Connected researchers with product and design teams

Worked our ecosystem designer(s) to ensure they had adequate requirements and understood the value of some of our bigger ecosystem initiatives. Helped support them with product partners and ensured a constant flow of communication among many other things.

Helped align designers with the highest impact / low effort projects

Deliverables

Create a marketplace for Mission Lane Products

This was the first highest value project we had for the team where we needed to offer our Mission Lane products but also non-Mission Lane products to our core members.

Enable a design system with common components

We wanted the look and feel of all of our products to match so we needed to elevate our design system and coordinate engineering efforts to ensure their codebases were connected to the system.

Offer a comprehensive roadmap for the next 2 quarters

We haven’t historically created roadmaps on the team so part of my personal deliverable was to help Product engage in roadmap creation.

Success + Impact

I was trusted to champion the product organization to create POA (product opportunity assessments) and PRD (product requirement documentation) artifacts. I was leading road mapping and initiative discussions through impact/effort workshops. And all the product teams started following our core ecosystem process afterwards.

Created artifacts to help Product roadmapping

Design system created!

We ended up taking our pattern library that we had. We had a couple design sprints to update it, and then had our engineers build out most of the core components so that teams throughout the company can start building products that felt like a cohesive experience