Lean Financial

I work as Lead Product Designer at Lean, a fintech start-up helping improve the financial lives of gig workers.

Joining as the company’s second designer, I have owned the end-to-end consumer experience. During my time at Lean I’ve led the redesign of the worker app, launched a push-to-debit payment product, a cash-advance product, and iteratively enhanced the experience across the worker’s journey with Lean towards a more stable and secure financial outlook.

Beyond the consumer experience, I have worked to enhance the marketplace partner experience by redesigning the payments dashboard, and supported leadership in our quest for product-market fit, whether through improving partner acquisition or matching products to a changing economy.

During my first 3 months of hire, I led the redesign and launch of our worker app. After chatting with marketplace stakeholders, users, and gig-workers, it became clear that the existing experience was disorienting and untrustworthy. I worked with Lean’s Head of Design to develop an overall journey map and prioritized use cases that served as foundation for the re-architecture of the app’s existing feature set. In tandem, we worked through visual concepts that better connected to the workers (and pivotally, the marketplace’s assumptions of workers’) expectations of a banking app. What emerged was a straight-forward and welcoming experience.

Redesign case study coming soon

I work closely with all parts of the business (product managers, researchers, engineers, legal, risk, customer success, leadership) to ensure that from idea to implementation, what we do is mutually favorable to end-users, partner marketplaces, and Lean’s business goals.

Data, research, and testing is at the heart of iterative improvements and larger product releases. I collaborate with our UX Researcher, Data Analyst, and Customer Success Lead to bring qualitative and quantitative color to the lives and journeys of the gig workers using Lean — whether through app usage behavior, customer feedback, or from informational interviews and surveys. These insights form the basis of hypotheses we run through A/B tests or prototyped usability tests, ultimately informing the executed solution.

This process has led to some fun projects, including the development of a cash-advance product and an instant cash-out product.

Case studies for these are forthcoming.

Lean Team

It’s such a pleasure to work with the talented, cross-functional team at Lean.
Here’s who I get to talk with most days:

SVP of Design: Paul Sieka
CPO: Eden Kfir
CTO: Tim Snyder
Legal Counsel: Stanton Lawyer
Customer Success Lead: Catherine Langford
Data & Risk Lead: Julia Nalven