A Decade at PayPal

Starting in research

I joined PayPal as a UX researcher. My job was to understand how people actually used the product — running lab studies, field visits, heuristic evaluations, surveys, and card sorts. I spent my first years sitting behind one-way mirrors watching merchants struggle with transaction histories and consumers abandon checkout flows.

That research shaped how I think about design to this day. Before I ever opened a design tool, I learned to listen — to spot the gap between what people say and what they do, to map the real workflow instead of the assumed one. It gave me a foundation in evidence-based decision making that carried through every role that followed.

Moving into design

The transition from research to design happened naturally. The more time I spent identifying problems, the more I wanted to solve them. I moved into a UX designer role and started owning product areas — first reporting, then transactions, then broader merchant tools.

Reporting was where I cut my teeth. Merchant reporting at PayPal was dense and technical — thousands of transactions, complex filtering, exports, reconciliation. The challenge was making that data accessible without dumbing it down. I learned that clarity isn't about removing complexity — it's about organizing it so the right information surfaces at the right moment.

From there I took on transactions and shipping — the everyday tools that merchants relied on to run their businesses. These weren't glamorous projects, but they were high-impact. Millions of merchants used these workflows daily, and even small improvements in usability translated into measurable reductions in support volume and processing time.

Funds Now and consumer payments

As I grew into a senior designer, my scope expanded beyond merchant tools into consumer-facing products. One of the most meaningful projects was Funds Now — an initiative to give PayPal users faster access to their money. The existing experience had users waiting days for transfers to clear. Funds Now changed that, and the design challenge was making instant access feel trustworthy and clear, not just fast.

Working on consumer payments taught me a different kind of design thinking. Merchant tools are about efficiency and power. Consumer products are about confidence and simplicity. The same person might be both a buyer and a seller on PayPal, but their mindset in each context is completely different. Learning to design for that duality made me a more versatile designer.

Developer experience

Later in my time at PayPal, I worked on developer-facing products — the APIs, documentation, and integration tools that third-party developers used to build on the PayPal platform. This was a different audience entirely. Developers don't want hand-holding — they want clear documentation, predictable behavior, and fast onboarding.

Designing for developers pushed me to think about systems rather than screens. The "product" wasn't just a UI — it was an API surface, a set of SDKs, sandbox environments, and documentation that all needed to feel cohesive. It was my first real experience designing at the platform level, and it changed how I approached every product problem after.

The migration

One of the largest efforts I was part of at PayPal was the legacy migration — moving the platform from its aging stack to a modern Node.js architecture. My role was on the design side: making sure that as engineering rebuilt the foundation, the user experience didn't just survive the transition — it got better.

The new stack unlocked capabilities we didn't have before. We could build richer, more interactive experiences. Animations, real-time updates, responsive layouts — things that had been technically painful became achievable. I worked closely with engineering to identify where the new technology could meaningfully improve the UX, not just replicate what existed.

The migration was also a lesson in restraint. It would have been easy to redesign everything. But millions of users had built muscle memory around existing workflows. The art was in modernizing the experience — making it faster, more responsive, more polished — without breaking the mental models people relied on.

What I took with me

Over a decade at PayPal, I went from someone who watched users struggle to someone who led teams that solved those problems. I learned to design for scale — where every decision touches millions of people. I learned that the best design work often isn't the most visible. And I learned that growing as a designer means expanding not just your craft, but your ability to influence, align, and lead.

By the time I left, I had worked across nearly every surface of the platform — consumer and merchant, web and mobile, UI and API. That breadth became the foundation for everything I've done since. PayPal is where I became a designer, and where I started becoming a design leader.