Single Pane of Glass: One Merchant Experience
A shared design system isn't a style guide — it's how you turn a decade of acquisitions into one merchant experience.
- Company
- Global Payments
- Role
- Sr. Product Design Manager, Design System Owner
- Scope
- 5 direct reports · Merchant Portal, Marketplace, Self-Boarding, Shared Services, Design System
- Timeframe
- 2024 – 2025
Context
Years of acquiring other payments companies had left Global Payments with dozens of merchant-facing portals — many with overlapping functionality, different brands, and different design systems. As part of a company-wide digital transformation, Single Pane of Glass (SPoG) set out to simplify onboarding, consolidate those portals into one experience, and scale value-added services. My role was to create shared UI components across those platforms and lead product design toward one world-class merchant experience.
Team
I led a team of 5, each mirroring a piece of the Product and Technology org: a senior designer on Merchant Portal (the gateway to every other experience), a designer on the public-facing Marketplace, a designer on Self-Boarding (spanning the Portal, Marketplace, and sales-led flows), a designer on Shared Services (the "App Tray," SSO/MFA), and a lead designer owning the Design System. We ran as one experience team, with daily remote working sessions and design reviews.
My approach
Early on I narrowed the effort to four areas I'd own directly:
- Discovery & team support — translating vague, fast-moving direction from product leadership into example user flows tied to real personas, and giving the team room to bring their own ideas rather than just executing tickets.
- Design system & brand consolidation — auditing every component across the SPoG products, sizing the migration effort, and getting a formal SLA and sign-off from product and engineering leadership on the plan — including a funding case for the additional dev and mobile QA resources it needed.
- Effective design delivery — keeping every Figma file dev-mode-ready, with components linked into the design system so engineering could pull directly from it via our internal plugin and Figma Dev Tools.
- Customer centricity — grounding decisions in user feedback wherever the timeline allowed.
Given the pace, a meaningful amount of the early discovery had to run on assumption rather than full UXR — a trade-off I made explicitly rather than let it block the team. TODO: add link to user validation research once it's run.
Craft evidence
View sample screens in Figma → — Marketplace and Self-Boarding design samples.
Outcome
- Design system adoption grew from 5 to 17 products in 1.5 years, once the system had one dedicated owner instead of being part-time work spread across the team, backed by an internal roadshow on its accessibility and consistency benefits.
- Account creation dropped from 7 steps to 4, reducing support calls.
- Onboarding drop-off improved at specific steps (field reduction itself was capped by underwriting requirements).
- Marketplace — pre-launch, organic traffic is already ahead of expectations, ahead of a planned Q3 marketing push tied to verified-user checkout.
- Portal "finding a report" customer-effort score rose 1 point after a nav reorganization and quick-start widget informed by user interviews and card sorts.
- Hand-off time to dev dropped a full sprint cycle using Figma Make.
Reflection
TODO — to be continued: platform-resource sharing across partner and internal design teams still needs to be written up.
Credit
Built with a five-person design team spanning Merchant Portal, Marketplace, Self-Boarding, Shared Services, and the Design System, in close partnership with product and engineering leadership.