Lead UX case study · Enterprise fintech

PayPal WATCH

Turning fragmented financial reporting into one trusted decision platform.

85%

productivity gain

for finance managers after launch

Role
Design Lead · Design owner
Timeline
1.3 years · 2-month MVP
Scope
PayPal · Venmo · Xoom
Partners
Product · Engineering · Finance
Read the evidence

01The business problem

The work was not “build a dashboard.” It was create confidence in the numbers.

Senior leaders and finance managers were piecing together transaction expenses across spreadsheets, disconnected reporting tools, and separate PayPal, Venmo, and Xoom views. Manual calculations slowed decisions and left teams without a standardized view.

Before WATCH · five handoffs

01

Identify

02

Collect

03

Clean

04

Analyze

05

Interpret

Cost of fragmentation

  • No standardized view
  • Manual calculations
  • Slow custom reporting
  • Conflicting interpretations

02My leadership

I changed the question from “What can we show?” to “What must people decide?”

01

Set the product strategy

Reframed a broad reporting request around decision speed, shared definitions, and executive trust.

02

Aligned the organization

Led working sessions across Product, Engineering, Finance, and Program leadership to resolve scope and metric priorities.

03

Raised team capability

Created a repeatable review cadence and mentored a junior designer toward independent ownership.

The pivotal insight: flexibility was adding cognitive load. Finance managers needed a confident starting point—not another empty configuration screen.

03The product pivot

The decision

Curate the Top 6. Keep the detail within reach.

Research showed that users did not need every metric at once. I guided the team away from a fully customizable metric picker and toward six prioritized metrics, with graph and table views for progressively deeper analysis.

01

Transaction expense

02

Payment volume

03

Expense rate

04

Business entity

05

Quarterly trend

06

Product detail

01

Think

Clarify the decision and test the data hierarchy

02

Make

Prototype quickly with representative data

03

Check

Validate the mental model with finance users

04The system

One overview for alignment. Progressive detail for action.

WATCH · Expense dashboard
Executive overview

Transaction expense

$3.13B

Payment volume

$511.4B

Expense rate

61.4 bps

Quarterly comparison

Graph / Table

Detail on demand

PayPal82%
Venmo69%
Xoom56%
Other entities43%

05What worked · What didn’t

The strongest decision was knowing what to stop designing.

The first direction valued maximum flexibility. Research changed the strategy: a useful financial product needed a clear point of view before it needed more configuration.

What worked

Alignment through evidence

  • Decision-first framing

    Centering the work on what finance managers needed to decide created a shared product goal.

  • Cross-functional working sessions

    Product, Engineering, and Finance resolved definitions and priorities together instead of reviewing in silos.

  • Fast Think · Make · Check loops

    Representative data made prototypes concrete enough to expose hierarchy and comprehension issues early.

What didn’t work

Flexibility without a starting point

  • The fully customizable metric picker

    It asked users to configure the experience before they could get value from it.

  • Showing every metric at once

    More data increased cognitive load without making the next decision clearer.

  • Treating all needs as equally important

    A broad feature set obscured the few measures finance managers relied on most.

Leadership takeaway

I used the unsuccessful concept to narrow the product—not defend the design. That pivot became the Top 6 model and the foundation for progressive detail.

06Outcome

Measured result

85%

Productivity gain for finance managers.

WATCH launched after the two-month MVP sprint with a unified, consistent view and a scalable framework for future requirements.

What changed

  • A shared view across PayPal, Venmo, and Xoom
  • Less manual reconciliation and reporting effort
  • Clearer movement from overview to detailed analysis
  • A reusable framework for expanding requirements