Role: Head Product Designer
Working at Steward combined my deep interest for regenerative agriculture with my knack for design. On top of that, the small team and intimate culture allowed me to take on work outside of the usual product design process.
It’s difficult to summarize the range of work I did in a single case study, but I wanted to give a glimpse of what my daily work looked like. Below you’ll find a range of projects I did over my time at Steward & I hope it gives a good idea of the variety of challenges I had the pleasure of tackling.
Context
Company Mission: Fund the growth of regenerative farms & food producers through loan facilitation.
To put it in even simpler terms, the goal was to connect everyday lenders (like you and me) to regenerative growers who would use the funds to expand their operation (this could be something as big as buying land or a hoop house or as small as purchasing a larger fridge or livestock feed).
At the end of the day, the goal was to make regenerative agriculture an accessible and mainstream investment option. Check out some of Steward’s projects here.
Company Size: 15
Product Team: 3
— and now a little glimpse into my daily work at Steward —
New Onboarding Design
I collaborated with the COO and Head of Engineering to develop a rigorous new onboarding that was compliant with continuously evolving financial regulations. I focused on using what we already had in our codebase to create a novel, yet simple experience that would guide our new and existing users through the murky waters of SEC regulations while introducing them to Steward’s lending platform.
If you’d like to see a full walkthrough of the onboarding we developed, I’d be happy to go over it in a one-on-one call.
Built an accessible design system
There was no comprehensive design library when I first started working at Steward. All of Steward’s design styles, components, & typography were kept in the codebase, which only our engineer had access to. Many of the initial design changes were made through redacted screenshots that were passed to our engineer who could only guess at how to implement the requested change.
After getting comfortable with Steward’s software, I got to work translating the code into Figma styles & components. I built Steward’s entire visual codebase within Figma, which allowed not only me to do my job more efficiently and effectively, but also gave the rest of the team the ability to use to a previously inaccessible system. Any design request or change could now be quickly built and iterated upon, making our product development process thorough, organized & intuitive.
High-level Product Development & Ideation
The screenshots above do little justice to the product work we were doing behind the scenes. Before any mocks were designed, we’d spend the majority of our time nailing down the direction and the high-level user flows that would solve a given business problem. That’s after we’d figure out the business problem in the first place.
I worked hand in hand with Steward’s VP of Engineering to figure out what was feasible from an engineering perspective but would also the best solution for our users. This intimate collaboration within the product team was always a highlight in my daily work—we were like an unstoppable think-tank tackling anything and everything that was thrown at us.
Continuous Design Refinement
A large portion of my work was continuously improving Steward’s platform. I tackled issues I caught from customer interviews & feedback. There was no problem too small to tackle if it meant creating the best platform experience.
Marketing & Print Design
My work didn’t stop at product design. On a daily basis I worked with Steward’s VP of Marketing to develop new campaigns, refine our lead generation process & designed printed material including letter-pressed cards that were sent out to our clients and customers (below).
Illustration
I also had the opportunity to develop Steward’s illustration language. My goal was to use illustration to further reinforce Steward’s human-centered approach to finance. The illustrations would be used to simplify complex financial concepts and as way-finding elements that would help users to navigate our website and lending platform.
My time working at Steward was truly unique. I never imagined being able to cover such a breadth of work as a single designer. While being a one man design team came with its own challenges, I quickly fell in love with the spontaneity and uncertainty of my daily work. I got to collaborate with so many different people, each with their own skills, to create what I feel was thorough, honest and compressive design work.