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Money Hub on desktop and mobile: this month's spending against last month, an offer to cancel unwanted subscriptions, a payoff plan prompt and linked accounts

Experian2025–2026

Leading PFM at suite scope

Leading design across four inherited products — and building the team and culture to hold them together.

My role
Lead Product Designer — suite-wide design direction, leading and mentoring the design team
Scope
Spending breakdown · Recurring bills · Personal banking · Debt management · Cash advances
Team
1 Senior Designer · 1 Junior Designer (added later)
Outcome
Senior designer promoted to Expert · Cross-suite design review established

The scope

Four products, one small team

My scope expanded from Personal banking to Experian's full personal financial management (PFM) suite, called Money Hub: four products, each with its own PM and roadmap, and a Cash advances product already in development. It came with a restructure: a new VP of product took ownership of the UX organization and asked leads to take on more, including mentoring the designers on their teams.

None of the four started with us; I inherited them all. I owned Spending breakdown, co-owned Recurring bills and led the design of Personal banking, and the senior designer led Debt management.

Holding four products together was an organizational problem as much as a design one. There was no structure for it, across the suite or inside the team, so building one, without the authority to mandate it, became the job.

  • Spending breakdown on a phone: earned and spent by month, with January 2025 selected

    Owned by me

    Spending breakdown

    Where users' money goes across linked accounts, and how it shifts over time.

  • Recurring bills on a phone: monthly recurring spend and total savings, with filters for upcoming, cancelable and negotiable bills

    Co-owned

    Recurring bills

    Subscriptions and repeating charges, in a single monthly view.

  • Personal banking on a phone: a checking account's available balance with a Transfer button

    Design led by me

    Personal banking

    Checking and savings, built in where users already manage their money.

  • Debt management on a phone: a payoff plan comparing minimum payments with a payoff strategy

    Led by the senior designer

    Debt management

    Credit cards and loans, with tools for prioritizing payoff. Built with our partner Array.

The suite · Workflows

Where the features touch

The four products looked separate, but they rested on the same two pages: every feature's insights came from the transaction archive, and drill-downs ended in Transactions and then Account details. None of the four roadmaps covered those pages, so a change one team made there reached every feature built on them, unseen until it shipped. I mapped where the features touched, so every team could see what a change to those pages would reach, and made the case to PMs across the suite that the shared pages were worth investing in: foundation work against feature work.

Inside Money Hub, Spending breakdown, Recurring bills and Personal banking all lead into the shared Transactions page, which leads into the shared Account details page. Debt management reads the same card and loan data directly, into Account details. Every feature depended on these two pages; none of their roadmaps covered them. Cash advances sits apart, a separate offer not built on spending data. MONEY HUB FEATURES SHARED PAGES Every feature dependedon these. None of theirroadmaps covered them. Every feature's insightsread from the same archive Tap a transaction →its account's history Reads the same card andloan data directly Spendingbreakdown Recurringbills Personalbanking Debtmanagement Cashadvances Separate offer, notbuilt on spending data Transactions Account details

Money Hub · Features

  • Spending breakdown
  • Recurring bills
  • Personal banking
  • Debt management

Every feature's insights read from the same archive

Shared pages

Every feature depended on these. None of their roadmaps covered them.

Transactions

Tap a transaction → its account's history

Account details

Debt management reads the same card and loan data directly.

Cash advancesSeparate offer, not built on spending data

Recreated for this case study: where the features touch.

The suite · The forum

One room, every roadmap

I established a recurring cross-suite design review: the PMs from every product, with the designers representing each one. Designers brought live work, the group critiqued it, and decisions that crossed product lines got made in the room rather than discovered after launch.

Setting up the review was the easy part. The harder work was the trust it took for designers and their PMs to bring unfinished work in front of their peers.

The review earned its place when the suite inherited Cash advances, a premium product already in development with our partner Brigit. I led its design. Once activated, it added a progress widget to Money Hub. Only one other team needed that space, so we negotiated the placement with them and brought it to the review so every team knew before launch. They agreed because only activated users, a small share of Money Hub's audience, would ever see it.

Money Hub on desktop and mobile with a cash advance in progress: on desktop the “Your advance” widget sits top right beside the spending chart; on mobile it stacks below the spending chart and a payoff plan prompt. The widget shows $75 due, a payment progress bar, a Manage advance button and “Powered by Brigit”
The placement the review saw before launch. Desktop: the widget holds the top right for users with an advance in progress. Phone: it stacks just below the hero charts and prompts.

The suite · Ownership

Inherited, then owned

No feature in Money Hub belonged to one designer from start to finish. What I owned was their upkeep and how they evolved; these are the screens I was responsible for.

What I was accountable for

  • Spending breakdown for January 2025 on a phone: earned, spent and remaining against the previous months, with spending by category led by Food & dining
    01 · Spending breakdown
  • Food & dining category detail: a month-by-month bar chart with January highlighted, the month's total, monthly average and largest transaction, and the transactions behind it
    02 · Category detail
  • Recurring bills: spent per month and total savings, filters for upcoming, cancelable and negotiable bills, and a list of upcoming charges with due dates
    03 · Recurring bills
  • Account details for a credit card: current balance with a trend chart, payment due date, minimum payment, statement balance, interest rate and credit utilization
    04 · Account details
  • Personal banking checking account: available balance with a Transfer button, savings offers, an empty recent transactions state and links into other Money Hub features
    05 · Personal banking
  • Transfer money: an amount keypad with quick amounts, moving money from a linked bank account into the Experian checking account
    06 · Transfer

The team · Practices

Talent without scaffolding

When I took on the suite, the senior designer was doing strong work with no structured lead above her: no formal check-ins, no defined growth path, no one protecting her time from meeting pressure.

Designers are judged on their artifacts, but calendar pressure eats into the time to produce them — and a senior designer doesn't grow toward lead without lead-level decisions to make. Four practices gave her that structure.

  • 01

    Protected maker time

    Blocked uninterrupted design time. Meetings deferred to specific windows. Artifacts — not attendance — became the measure of contribution.

  • 02

    Permission to decide

    Made it safe for her to make lead-level calls on her own, without checking with me first. Over time, consulting me became her choice, not a required step.

  • 03

    Candid check-ins

    Regular 1:1s structured around honesty rather than status updates. What's working, what's not, what needs to change.

  • 04

    Open critique

    Work shared early, critiqued honestly, defended openly. Showing unfinished work was encouraged — the only way to get better faster.

When we added a junior designer, she joined into these practices instead of waiting for them to exist.

Growth of the team

The human outcome

The senior designer led the design of Debt management. My part was helping her streamline the work and make its calls with confidence. While we worked together, she was promoted to Expert — one level below Lead in Experian's design organization.

I won't claim the promotion was mine to give, but the environment we built together made it possible. That's the outcome I'm most proud of.

Debt management · Led by the senior designer

  • Choose cards to work on: credit cards with balances and estimated APRs, three selected, with the selected balance, current monthly payment and an APR disclosure
  • Shorten payoff time: a chart comparing payoff with minimums only against a recommended strategy, a monthly payment slider set to $335, and a caution that larger payments could strain a budget
  • Payoff plan: payoff dates with minimums only and with the strategy, a prompt to pair each debt to a connected account for real-time tracking, and the monthly amount for each card

Senior designer growth arc

  1. Starting pointSenior DesignerStrong craft, no lead above her
  2. Under this structureExpanded ownershipThe practices, applied: lead-level calls, protected time, candid 1:1s
  3. Observable shiftIncreased confidenceMore decisive; owned Debt management's direction
  4. OutcomePromoted to Expert

Forward vision

What I'd do differently

“The cross-suite alignment we achieved was real — but it was achieved through influence, not structure. The next version needs both.”

That worked, but it's brittle. With formal authority, I'd make official what I had to advocate for: a named owner for cross-product workflows, with engineering counterparts, a cross-product design lead role, and a seat at the product strategy table before roadmaps are set — not after.