Scaling design from zero to one hundred
In my five years at Abacum, I helped grow the company from an early-stage startup to a Series B scale-up. I built the foundations of the product and brand, grew a five-person design team, and positioned design as a strategic driver of company success.
Organization
Abacum (B2B Fintech)
Timeline
2020-2025
Role
From Founding Designer to Director of Design
Scope
Product design • Brand design • Leadership
Goal
Build a next-generation financial planning platform from the ground up—taking care of everything design-related while gradually building and leading a design team.
Designing a financial planning tool
As Abacum’s founding designer, I joined the first product squad, working hand in hand with the PM and engineers. While releasing new features on a weekly cadence, I laid the foundations for a component library and ramped up on the complex domain of financial planning. As the company grew, I hired product designers to take over existing squads and joined new ones myself—tackling the most ambiguous problem spaces and ensuring continuity across teams.
Once the design team reached five and operated autonomously, I shifted focus to high-impact, strategic initiatives. I explored opportunities for AI-driven features, clarified overlapping product areas, and combined UI evolution, UX refinements, and new capabilities into a cohesive product vision—aligning the organization and inspiring investors.
Scaling a team
As I built and led a multidisciplinary design team, my focus shifted to improving processes and creating the systems that allowed design to scale sustainably.
Key challenges included strengthening collaboration within both the design team and the wider organization, enabling autonomy while maintaining design quality, and fostering a motivated, high-performing team. See cards below for concrete examples.
Brand & marketing
Although product design was my primary focus, I also took on brand and marketing needs as they arose. I designed and launched the first marketing website in just one week using Webflow, created ad and social templates for the marketing team, and produced product videos in After Effects.
Later, I partnered with our brand designer to refine the brand identity and visual metaphor, and with the Head of Marketing to revamp the marketing website. In just six weeks, we restructured the site architecture, unified and evolved the design, created new copy and visual assets, and implemented everything in-house using Framer—doubling traffic and quadrupling demo requests.
