Impact
I joined Global Payments supporting a retail POS platform used by merchants across the country. Early on, my focus was execution — building out features, extending the design system, and developing a thorough understanding of the product's architecture and constraints.
The scale and complexity of enterprise design was unlike anything I'd worked with before. Components had dependencies across multiple surfaces. Design decisions had downstream effects on engineering, operations, and merchant experience. Learning to work within that system — and eventually to shape it — became the foundation of my growth here.
A few months in, my manager came to me with an opportunity: a subsidiary product within the portfolio needed a dedicated designer. With the support of my team, I stepped into ownership of that product as its primary designer.
It was the first time I wasn't just contributing to a product. I was responsible for it.
Taking on a product end-to-end
Owning an enterprise product required a different way of thinking. Success wasn't measured by screens delivered — it meant holding the full picture: merchant needs, technical constraints, business priorities, and long-term scalability, all at once.
One of my first observations was that the product's design system hadn't kept pace with the product itself. Components lacked flexibility, documentation was inconsistent, and the gap between design and production was slowing everyone down.
Rather than treating this as a cleanup task, I approached it as a systems problem. I rebuilt the component library from the ground up — introducing structured properties, reusable patterns, and clear documentation that aligned closely with how engineering implemented the product.
The result wasn't a prettier Figma file. It became a shared language between design and engineering, and the foundation for every initiative that followed.
Impact:
A scalable design system that improved cross-functional consistency and accelerated design delivery across the product.
Component structure example
As the product matured, I realized my biggest opportunities weren't always inside Figma. They were in improving how the entire team worked.
As the design organization grew, I became responsible for bringing other designers up to speed on a platform with significant complexity and institutional knowledge.
I started by onboarding one junior designer — creating structured learning plans, documentation, and hands-on workshops covering the product, design system, and team workflows. When a broader organizational restructure expanded the team further, those materials evolved into a reusable onboarding program that could scale across multiple designers without requiring my direct involvement each time.
The goal was to build something that worked without me in the room — resources that gave designers the context to move independently while maintaining consistent standards across the product.
Impact:
Onboarded 8 designers onto a complex enterprise platform, reducing ramp-up time and improving design consistency across the team.
Figma workshops
As the product evolved, I noticed that most planning conversations started from requirements and requested features rather than from a clear understanding of the merchants we were designing for.
To address this, I introduced a structured discovery process — bringing research, user personas, prototyping, and usability testing into the early stages of product development. These artifacts gave teams a common reference point before any design or engineering work began.
The shift was subtle but significant. Conversations moved from "what are we building" to "why does this matter to the person using it" — and alignment between product, design, and engineering improved as a result.
Impact:
Established a repeatable discovery process that reoriented product conversations around user needs before development began.
User personas
As accessibility requirements became a consistent part of our design process, I noticed a quiet but significant drain on the team's time. Annotating a single page — cataloguing focus order, ARIA labels, interactive states, and alt text — took upwards of 6 hours per screen, done entirely by hand, every sprint. It was repetitive, error-prone, and pulled designers away from higher-value work.
I decided to build a solution rather than work around the problem.
Using AI and Figma's API, I developed a custom plugin that scans any Figma frame and automatically generates comprehensive accessibility annotations. The output isn't a static document — it produces a mutable, structured table that designers can review and adjust inline, and that engineers can export directly as JSON for immediate use in development. The handoff artifact that used to require a full day of manual work is now generated in under 5 minutes, with more depth and developer utility than the original process ever provided.
The plugin spread beyond our immediate team and was adopted across multiple design groups at the company — a sign that the problem wasn't unique to us.
Impact:
~98% reduction in accessibility annotation time (6+ hours → under 5 minutes per screen), with a higher-quality output that accelerated engineering handoff and reduced back-and-forth between design and development.
When I joined Global Payments, I thought great design meant crafting polished, well-considered interfaces. Three years later, I understand it as something broader — creating clarity within complex systems, aligning teams around user needs, and building processes that continue to work long after any individual has moved on.
The work I'm most proud of from this period isn't a feature or a screen. It's the progression from a designer focused on execution to one capable of influencing how a team works, how a product scales, and how an organization thinks about design's role in the process.
Note on NDA:
Specific product screens, merchant data, and proprietary platform details are not shown in this case study out of respect for confidentiality agreements. Happy to walk through process artifacts and discuss design decisions in a conversation.