Empowering Mexico’s unbanked
Workforce
Key result
Increased accountability within design teams, alignment between product and marketing leadership.
I worked with the Chief Executive, Product, and Growth Officers to better integrate the company’s product and marketing design teams, coached both design team leads, and led design reviews with contributors.
albo is a Mexico City-based challenger bank, serving the country’s un- and under-banked population with crucial financial tools like savings and online bill payments.
Workforce
Aligning key leaders
During my 14-month engagement, I helped align and avail design’s value to organizational goals. I worked with a variety of stakeholders across Product, Marketing and Operations to transform the organization’s approach to user-centered design.
Angel Sahagun Fernandez, Chief Executive Officer
Matthew Leavenworth, Chief Product Officer
Gris Olmedo, Head of Brand
Francisco Rodriguez, Chief Growth Officer
Next steps
Like many young, high-growth organizations, albo must maintain their startup ingenuity but build the repeatable processes that will allow them to scale. If I were to continue guiding their design practice, my advice advice would be to:
Reform design reviews: When I was with them, senior leadership would almost always review a design directly before it shipped. This makes sense, as in a startup the founders sign off on all work. But during high growth, a leader’s lack of involvement with the entire project can rob them of the crucial context they need to understand why certain decisions were made. At this stage, senior leaders should either dedicate the time to be involved, or delegate sign-off.
Unify the marketing and product experiences: There were many opportunities to unify certain aspects of both UIs, namely illustrations and icons, color palette, and CTA style. Centralizing these design systems would reduce overhead and create more trust in the brand.
Clarify roles and responsibilities: In a startup, everyone kind of does everything. At scale, roles and responsibilities must be clearly defined to reduce confusion and duplicate work. Clearer job descriptions and process documentation is needed.
