Building design from zero
As Interim Director of Design at Geode Capital, an $850 billion asset manager, I introduced design as a discipline to an organization that had never used it. Over 16 months, I built a 3-person UX team, codified a user-centered process, and shipped four portfolio management apps.
16
months
3
hires
4
apps
Geode Capital is an $850 billion asset manager, one of the largest passive investment firms in the country. It's also one of the most regulated. Every decision has to be defensible to clients, auditors, and the SEC. When I joined as Interim Director of Design, the firm had never used design as a discipline. The work was to introduce it carefully.
Innovation—departing from the first or safest answer—is particularly challenging in finance, where a single error can cost hundreds of billions of dollars or trigger a regulatory audit. Geode operates inside that constraint every day, which meant introducing design wasn't about adding craft. It was about earning trust that a new way of working could be safe.
Because Geode operates in a highly-regulated space, details and images of product design work can’t be shared.
Introducing the practice
I started with a series of hands-on workshops, designed to let Geode's product, engineering, and business teams experience the design process directly before encountering it in a project. Walking people through ideation, prototyping, and testing as participants — rather than presenting it as a methodology — made the eventual handoff to the UX team feel like continuation rather than disruption.
Mapping the work
Eight hour-long group interviews surfaced what each of Geode's seven cross-functional teams actually needed:
Portfolio managers: Day-to-day planning and management of Geode's 200+ funds
Traders: Receive and execute trade requests from portfolio managers
Senior leadership: Oversight, review, and approval of portfolio actions
Risk and performance analysts: Identifying adverse events and analyzing outcomes
Compliance officers: Ensuring activity adheres to SEC and other regulation
Trade operations: Facilitating and executing trades
Business development: Supporting Geode's clients, the largest of which is Fidelity
The interviews helped Product decide which teams and opportunities to prioritize first.
Designing the process
Working with Product and Engineering leads, I codified a user-centered design process tailored to Geode's software development lifecycle that gave cross-functional teams a shared understanding of roles and responsibilities. We anchored the toolchain in Miro for discovery and synthesis, Productboard for grooming and resourcing, Figma for prototyping and testing, and GitLab for delivery.
A shared, user-centered software development lifecycle map allowed the Product team to track rate of completion, for reporting to senior leadership
Building the design system
Since Geode's tools are internal, I forked IBM's open-source Carbon design system as the foundation for our UI library. Carbon's comprehensive component documentation shaved months off our setup time and let us focus on the modifications that actually mattered for finance — including a dark mode theme tuned for long sessions at multi-monitor trading workstations.
I led biweekly design system meetings consisting of UX designers and front-end engineers, with each designer also running ideation sessions inside their cross-functional team. Engineering provided the strongest support; their willingness to explore unorthodox solutions accelerated everything.
Tailored patterns for status induction, one of the many patterns and components created for the project, allowed Geode’s fund management teams to absorb and act on information faster and with more precision
Shipping
With the team and process in place, we shipped MVPs for four portfolio management apps:
Portfolio Dashboard: For portfolio managers to determine if funds are out of tolerance
Cash Management: For portfolio managers to predict cash flows in and out of their funds
Portfolio Manager Out-of-Office: For portfolio managers to secure fund coverage when away
Fund Setup and Tolerance Setting: For portfolio managers and senior leaders to configure new and existing funds
Geode continues to evolve their development processes and modernize their internal software.
What I learned
Introducing design as a discipline inside an organization that's never had it is different from joining an existing design team. The work isn't really about designing screens; it's about designing the team, the process, the tools, and the credibility of the practice itself. All at once, while still shipping. In a regulated industry like asset management, the bar is even higher: every decision is observed, every error is consequential, and the case for design has to be made through outcomes the business can measure. It's the kind of work I'm looking to do next.
