At the beginning of 2021, I was hired as the 12th employee at Juni to establish a high-performing product design team. I joined shortly after the founders had secured seed funding. At that time, there was no product—only a company vision, a prototype, and a waiting list of early customers expressing interest. My mission was to create a team that would integrate customer insights and develop outstanding features. Over the next three and a half years, I undertook the below initiatives:
Overview
5 key takeaways
Upon joining, the first task assigned to the Junior Designer and me was to develop the beta version of the product. As the only designers in the company, we were also tasked with creating marketing materials such as ad campaigns, banners, templates, and anything else requiring a keen eye for visual details.
Initial vision concept
Initially, the founding team developed a vision concept to garner early interest and create a waiting list campaign. This concept included a broad array of potential features, inspired by their experiences from previous ventures.
Learning from customers
From the outset, while designing essential features, the other Designer and I engaged with prospects from the waiting list. These discussions helped us understand their main pain points and better grasp why they signed up and what their expectations were. This insight allowed us to appropriately prioritize the desirable yet non-essential features alongside those that were fundamental and clearly needed to be developed.
Beta product
The outcome was a beta product that retained the core functionalities outlined in the initial concept but included only a limited set of features. However, it established a more consistent and scalable design language.
Build and iterate
With the product live and user feedback flowing in from the sales and customer success teams, we continued to iterate and enhance the feature set. One of our initial focuses was refining the onboarding process to streamline new customer integration. We quickly recognized that offering virtual cards as an early benefit was essential. Card exchanges became one of our first revenue streams, highlighting the importance of making it easy for customers to sign up and access these services.
After transitioning out of beta, we identified numerous issues customers faced with their daily financial operations. This led to the creation of a comprehensive backlog for the product roadmap, which is constructed annually and revised quarterly. Initially, development progressed rapidly, but this fast pace resulted in some accumulating design debt. However, with a now 10-member design team embedded across various product teams, we adopted a more cohesive process throughout the product design and development cycles.
Streamlining design delivery
With multiple initiatives underway simultaneously, a robust information architecture was necessary. Building and reusing design patterns allowed us to develop and connect product features uniformly. Launching an initial version of our Design System accelerated the development process while maintaining consistency. Continuous vision prototypes enabled us to go beyond mere feature requests, assessing opportunities that align closely with our company vision.
Optimizing product market fit
As a result, we developed a wide array of new features to diversify our revenue streams and enhance the overall user experience. We typically began with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and iterated based on feedback. Below is a selection of the most significant products and features:
From the beginning, we have consistently developed and refined our vision, experimenting with various approaches. These efforts not only led to improved outcomes but also helped to establish a shared understanding of the impact we anticipate from these vision exercises. The most recent approach we employed involved interviews, customer service feedback, problem definition, and user journey mapping.
Journey mapping
User journey mapping allowed all stakeholders to take a step back from their specific responsibilities and see their contributions as part of the entire user experience. This strategic overview helped define key areas and served as the guiding framework for our approach.
Vision prototyping
The result was a vision prototype that demonstrated potential solutions to critical scenarios outlined in the vision. In this case, we aimed to showcase a task-centric user interface that simplifies navigation and resolution of the most pressing financial issues, without the users needing to interact separately with each feature of the platform.
With a rebranding happening when coming out of beta, and a generally much more complex product we wanted to use this opportunity to unify our designs that become increasingly inconsistent with an increased team size.
Customizing an open design system
Initially, we utilized Ant.Design for our product development. While it offered extensive functionality, we encountered areas that were either superfluous or lacking. Our approach involved consolidating and refining this design system to align with our rebranding efforts, updating existing components, and creating new ones with a keen focus on accessibility.
Setting up libraries and processes
The result of these efforts was the creation of our own Figma libraries, which bridged the Design and Frontend teams through the use of Storybook. We established initial processes for working with and contributing to the Design System, allowing for considerable autonomy within the team while ensuring coverage for all design cases. Design System work was a collective effort, but we specifically assigned one designer and one front-end developer to set up and maintain the system. We also implemented a preliminary evaluation phase to monitor the progress and adoption of the Design System.
