03 / Merchants
A closed-loop marketplace concept for a LATAM digital banking platform, built in a compressed timeline to secure executive buy-in for a new business line. *Under NDA — names, colors, and visual details have been altered.
Executive review was scheduled before the feature set was finalized. Rather than fight the timeline, I made a conscious choice: invest in a brand direction distinctive enough that stakeholders would engage with the concept emotionally — which would buy time for the feature work.
The idea itself was simple: a closed-loop marketplace letting members buy and sell among themselves within the platform's trusted network. Making it fundable in a month was the real design problem.
No user research phase — decisions were based on observable behavior and explicitly documented assumptions.
A moving feature set — scope changed multiple times over the course of the engagement.
A second product for users already inside one — the marketplace needed to feel like an extension, not a separate app.
One month, start to finish, to go from concept to something stakeholders could fund.
Before touching UI, I mapped the core flows: how a member becomes a seller, how invitations propagate through the closed network, how a transaction flows from listing to payment. This was the first real structure the project had — until that point, the idea lived entirely in conversations.
Merchants' first flow chart.
Executive review was scheduled before the feature set was finalized. Rather than fight the timeline, I made a conscious choice: invest in a brand direction distinctive enough that stakeholders would engage with the concept emotionally, which would buy time for the feature work.
I drew on Scandinavian graphic design — specifically the way it treats each element as a standalone visual unit that coheres into a larger system. It mirrored the product's logic: each seller is their own small storefront, aggregated into a shared marketplace. Stakeholders responded to the logo concept and adopted it as the project's primary mark — the visual work made the concept feel real enough to fund.
Color scheme and first logo iteration — "Merchants," a project alias.
Login screen, first iteration.
The hardest conversation of the project was scoping. Stakeholders wanted everything in v1. I pushed back by mapping every proposed feature and categorizing it: essential for a functional marketplace, dependent on integration with the banking product, or nice-to-have.
This map became the alignment document. It reframed the conversation from "what do we want?" to "what's the smallest coherent thing we can launch?" — a question stakeholders were far more willing to answer.
* Undefined / not part of the scope
Site map, censored for public view.
I deliberately stopped at mid-fidelity rather than pushing to polished UI. The feature set was still in motion, so high-fidelity work would have been thrown away — and mid-fidelity forced stakeholders to engage with structure and interaction, not aesthetics.
First iteration: home screen, product search, and the flow to start selling.
None of these were hypothetical trade-offs — each one forced a real decision under the timeline, not just a compromise on paper. A few of them are still worth naming plainly.
No user research in Phase 1. This was the constraint I was most uncomfortable with. I mitigated it by basing decisions on observable behavior — the existing chat-based trading — and by explicitly documenting every assumption, so Phase 2 would know where to validate first.
Designing a second product for users already inside a different one. Members would move between the banking platform and the marketplace in the same session. I spent significant time on the seams, making the marketplace feel like a natural extension rather than a separate app.
A moving feature set. Scope changed multiple times during the engagement. Rather than rebuilding from scratch each time, I built the site map and flow diagrams as living documents, which let us absorb changes without restarting.
The project was paused in 2020 when leadership priorities shifted and the budget was reallocated. The work wasn't built, but the brand direction and the scoping framework continued to be referenced internally for the marketplace idea.
The project didn't ship, and I'm okay with that being part of the story. What I took from it was a durable understanding of how design operates when the ideal process isn't available — which turns out to be most of the time, in most companies.
Treat the executive review as a design problem in itself, with its own success criteria. I handled it intuitively then, but I'd now build a pitch narrative with as much rigor as the product itself.
Separate brand exploration from product visual design more cleanly. Collapsing them under time pressure muddied both — with more space, I'd keep them on distinct tracks and let each inform the other.