Building a Merchant Experience Design Team

Context

Global Payments was consolidating a sprawling, inconsistent set of merchant-facing products — account portals, onboarding, and value-added services (VAS) — into one coherent experience, while the business pushed hard on VAS revenue targets and a shared login. As Senior Product Design Manager, I owned the design org responsible for that consolidation: hiring, structuring, and running a team that grew to 8 designers.

The problem

Before this structure existed, the portal, onboarding, and VAS experiences were so disjointed that many customers didn't realize the products they used came from the same company. Distributing work by ticket or feature area wasn't going to fix that — it would just spread the same fragmentation across more people.

My approach

Rather than splitting the backlog evenly, I organized the team around five pillars mapped directly to business function, each with a dedicated owner:

• Account Portal — the core day-to-day product experience merchants rely on
• Shared Services (SSO, user management) — the platform layer every other experience depends on
• Self-Serve Onboarding — the acquisition and activation funnel
• Marketplace / VAS Upsell — a direct revenue growth lever
• Design System — the force multiplier keeping quality and velocity consistent across the other four

Each pillar got a named owner with end-to-end accountability, so the business always had a specific person to go to for a given priority — not a queue.

Staffing. I hired four of the team members directly and inherited a designer previously focused on internal boarding tools, reassigning them to the merchant-facing boarding experience. I moved the marketplace designer into that pillar because of their prior VAS experience and outside marketing-design background; the systems designer was hired specifically for the design-system pillar for their eye for detail and accessibility focus. Some existing hires were offboarded from other projects to make room for this more focused structure.

Coordination. Shared Services and the Design System underpinned the other three pillars, which made prioritization friction inevitable — competing requests for shared components, or onboarding blocked on an SSO change. We ran two standing design reviews a week (one formal critique, one informal check-in) and tied every request to a specific revenue or delivery goal, so trade-offs had a shared frame of reference instead of becoming a debate about whose work mattered more.

Craft evidence

Outcome

• Design system adoption grew from 5 to 17 products in 1.5 years, driven by giving the system a dedicated full-time owner instead of treating it as everyone's part-time work.
• Account creation dropped from 7 steps to 4 after the platform pillar mapped account hierarchy and user roles — which also reduced support call volume.
• Design-to-dev hand-off time dropped by a full sprint cycle after the team adopted Figma Make.
• Onboarding drop-off improved at specific steps (e.g., MCC selection), though field reduction was constrained by underwriting requirements.
• Portal customer-effort score for "finding a report" rose 1 point after user interviews, a card-sort-driven nav reorganization, and a new quick-start widget.

Reflection

Mapping ownership to business function instead of feature area is what made this team scale cleanly — every designer became the go-to expert for their slice of the business, and leadership never had to ask "who owns this?" The trade-off is real: shared-services and design-system work sit on the critical path for everyone else, so that pillar needs the most deliberate prioritization protection.

Credit

This work reflects the Merchant Experience design team — dedicated owners across Account Portal, Shared Services, Onboarding, Marketplace, and the Design System — not a solo effort.