After successfully leading the migration of Varo’s product UX from the old design system to the new MAS version of VXL, my scope increased to leading the full Product Design team, reporting directly to our Chief Design Officer. During my tenure the team grew to 6 ICs (including a UX Engineer), 2 of which I hired and onboarded into the company.

I oversaw the full redesign of our banking signup flow, an entirely new approach to onboarding & in-product nurture, bringing credit monitoring to all customers, as well as work that enabled Varo customers to send money to anyone instantly, (even to non-Varo customers) as well as exploration and envisioning of our next-gen customer experience design efforts.

I’ve also lead work to establish our Product Design Principles & Practices and the establishment of new norms and processes around Design Critique, Weekly team status stand-ups, and weekly executive Design Reviews.

Product Design Initiatives

Redesigned Signup flow

New application design resulted in 3% net lift in completions as a result of breaking the flow into more steps with fewer fields per screen, reducing cognitive load & allowing users to build more momentum versus our old “Octavia” signup flow. Users completed the new signup flow in 25% less time than the previous flow as well.

Project Polaris Onboarding + Nurture

Before kicking off Project Polaris, Varo lacked a cohesive onboarding strategy, and we’d learned from user research that Varo was losing the time-to-value battle to our competitors. New Customers struggled to understand how to unlock the best of Varo, and ended up churning out at a rate higher than the business would like.

I led the design work to introduce an onboarding wizard & nurture pattern for Next Best Actions. This has resulted in dramatic lift to both the number of new customers funding within the first 7 days, but also the amount with which they fund as well.

Credit Score for all

Previously only available to customers of Believe (our credit builder card), in Q2 ‘23 the team delivered Credit Score for All, to provide immediate value for new customers and to address their #1 Job To Be Done: Build Credit & Improve Financial Health.

Varo 2 Anyone

Another big initiative in Q2 ‘23 for Varo was the implementation of “Varo 2 Anyone”, or the ability to send money to anyone (including non-varo custoemrs) instantly for free. This was a bet on speed of money movement being valuable to our customers, as well as an additional potential channel for low cost customer acquisition for the business.

Business Impact of mAS

After the company successfully rolled out the MAS brand across all our properties and surfaces (including the marketing site), as well as making many product improvements (some of which you see here), I presented the “Business Impact of Make A Statement” to exec leadership. Here is one slide that summarizes how the new brand direction has impacted Varo

What’s next? Next-Gen APP Information Architecture

As Varo’s app experience has evolved, we found that the Hometab can be a bit of a dumping ground, and also that our App’s information architecture is limited, reflects our org structure, and lacks expected entry points into things like profile and notifications. We kicked off an effort to re-imagine our Hometab & broader IA at a workshop in late Q2 ‘23, which is ongoing in partnership with our growth Product partners.