From three visual designers to a product team.
I built meutudo.'s product design practice from the ground up — two opposite audiences, FGTS and INSS, under one Design System — turning design from visual support into a driver of efficiency and growth.
Results accumulated over 2 years as Head of Product Design (2022—2024).
Two credit products, two audiences that barely spoke to each other.
meutudo. ran payroll-secured lending with two core products: FGTS, aimed at active formal workers using their severance fund as collateral, and INSS, aimed at retirees using their pension as backing. Using the FGTS fund as collateral — money already provisioned by the government — made it possible to offer rates far below the big banks. Around these two cores orbited accessory products: refinancing (Refin), insurance and structured notes (COE).
The company came from a traditional lending operation — physical stores, on-the-spot approval — and was migrating to a digital, startup-style operation. It had consolidated market reach and influence, but its digital-product context was still maturing.
The core complexity was not technical — it was opposite audiences inside the same product. FGTS served a working-age bracket with medium digital maturity. INSS served retirees, an older bracket with lower tech familiarity, requiring human support by voice and chat as part of the journey.
Two personas that barely spoke to each other — under the same regulatory umbrella of payroll lending: proof of life, facial recognition, integration with government platforms.
A design org that had never existed as such — and had to mature while delivering.
When I joined, meutudo. had never had design leadership. The area was run by the product team, and the three existing designers came from a marketing and branding background, working at a still very visual layer. The leap from "making screens" to "designing journeys with business logic and data" was missing.
The hardest challenge was reconciling the FGTS vs. INSS duality with a team that needed to mature at the same pace it delivered. Each persona asked for opposite design decisions — simplicity and autonomy for FGTS, guidance and assisted security for INSS — yet both had to share the same Design System, the same regulatory backbone and the same delivery pipeline.
In the background, but just as critical: building process and governance from scratch without stalling velocity. The company was already sizeable headcount-wise. Design needed a fluid pipeline — upstream and downstream, sprints, reviews, stakeholder validation — that brought consistency without becoming bureaucracy.
Structure the team, go down into execution, go up into integration.
The first move was to design, together with the Heads of Product and Technology, a squad structure by front — balancing the core products with the support and growth fronts.
One leadership decision cut across the whole structure: not splitting designers by platform (web vs. app). Each designer moved between the two — the journey is a single path, with per-platform specifics but conceived as a whole. Cross tasks, like reworking the app home, ran as design sprints — impacting FGTS, INSS and onboarding at once, within proof-of-life compliance and government-platform integration.
Don’t split designers by platform. The journey is a single path — designed as a whole, not as loose screens.
Maturity was sustained by a system of team rituals — among them a biweekly timeboxed critique and an objective unblocking weekly — plus 1:1s and growth plans cascaded through the two Design Leads, balancing hard and soft skills over time.
From visual support function to a vector of efficiency and growth.
Over two years, process metrics consolidated the operational gain: +36% design efficiency via Design System, +29% time-to-market via DesignOps and ProdOps, −25% support contacts from improvements found in research, and +20% customer satisfaction in critical journeys.
The continuous-research culture — recurring studies with the base, direct customer contact and beta tests with a diverse audience — significantly expanded the volume of strategic insight available to product.
At the business level, the design and product work connected directly to the metrics tracked across fiscal cycles — revenue and contract volume — alongside base-health indicators like LTV, CAC, CSAT and CES. By the end of the period, the design org had moved from a visual support function to a recognized vector of operational efficiency and growth, integrated end to end with product, technology and marketing.