Sep 2020 → Aug 2025
B2B Fintech
Founding Designer → Director of Design
Scaling product, brand, and design culture 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. As the founding designer and later Director of Design, I built the foundations of the product and brand, grew a 5-person design team, and positioned design as a strategic driver of company success.
Context
Adventure awaits
I joined Abacum as the sixth employee and founding designer, drawn by the challenge of building a B2B fintech product from scratch. At the time, the product was a technical proof of concept with no front-end, used by a single customer, and the brand consisted only of a name and logo. My role encompassed everything design-related, starting as an individual contributor and gradually building a design team around me.
Approach
Wearing all the hats
In early-stage startups, efficiency and prioritization are everything. While onboarding to the complex domain of financial planning, I began designing features with the first product squad and laid the foundations of a Figma component library.
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, produced product videos in After Effects, and even designed company swag—like the baseball caps for our summer offsite (pun intended).
Product Design
Brand Design
Scaling team and systems
About six months in, I started hiring the first team members, beginning with a brand designer and a UX researcher, followed by product designers. As the team took on more responsibility, I shifted my focus to design operations and leadership.
Strengthening Design’s influence
With the team managing both their work and design rituals, I turned my focus to strategic, high-impact initiatives.
Product vision
I created quarterly product visions that combined user insights, platform constraints, and competitor analysis to guide long-term direction. These began as focused feature concepts and evolved into holistic proposals blending UI refinements, UX improvements, and entirely new functionality.
The most recent deck spanned 100+ slides and was presented as a cohesive narrative to inspire the broader team and align the company around a shared direction. These vision presentations became essential tools for the Product, Design, and Tech leadership team, shaping early strategic decisions and cross-functional alignment.
Marketing website 2.0
The original marketing site I had built was later reworked multiple times, becoming inconsistent, hard to maintain, and underperforming (~5,000 monthly visitors, 5–10% demo request rate).
Together with the Head of Marketing, I led a complete redesign and rebuild in Framer. Within six weeks, we restructured the architecture, redesigned the experience, and implemented it from scratch. I built self-serve components so the marketing team could independently update content and launch new landing pages. Today, abacum.ai includes 50+ static pages and multiple CMS-powered sections.
To elevate the experience, I also learned Spline to create animated 3D brand artifacts embedded throughout the site.
Outcome