Project name
Open Collective
About the organization
Who is behind this project?
Open Collective is a financial management platform enabling grassroots groups to raise and spend money transparently.
I started working with Open Collective as an individual design contributor, then transitioned to a client relationship, and, a couple of projects and years later, I ended up leading the design operations of the organization.
I designed Open Collective to be a platform that enables communities and grass-roots projects to raise and spend money transparently; to deliver this simple idea, there were several caveats and complications that I grew familiar with, exercising my capacity to grip abstract ideas and transform them into usable solutions.
Within my role at OC, I was in charge of leading the design strategy and production on all fronts:
From establishing, maintaining, and scaling the design system, to leading the entire lifecycle of new features for the product, documenting the decision-making involved in design projects, managing the design team, defining the design culture, best practices, and how to implement them. I hired talent, coached new designers, let some talent go, and took part in the team's hiring strategy.
Role:
Head of Design
Category:
Product design, UI/UX, Creative direction
Collaborators:
Amina Kazi, Delfina Peydro, Darío Muñoz, Pia Mancini, Benjamin Piouffle, Benjamin Nickols, and the Open Collective team.
Project info
Establish, maintain, and scale the design system
The foundations of the product design process
I continuously published updates, worked closely with the engineering team, and ensured a 1:1 parity between production and design.
As an open-source initiative, Open Collective required its design system to be open and approachable, enabling communities to interact transparently with the platform's design and use or adapt parts of the design system for their own needs.
Lead the lifecycle of new product features
From ideation and discovery all the way to implementation and testing
I collaborated closely with the engineering team to implement a myriad of features aimed at simplifying the experience and providing transparent financial management for the collectives hosted on the platform.
From ideation and discovery through to the handoff to production, the process involved multiple feedback rounds with users and stakeholders.
Each feature required a deep understanding of the problem, achieved through documentation, facilitated workshops, user discovery calls, team data analysis, and extensive asynchronous collaborative work.
Document the process and its decision making
A documentation base for all the design work
Examples of some projects' video journaling
2023 / 2024
