Capital One

Capital One wanted to expand their business credit portfolio. The product was Max — a tool to help accounting teams track spending patterns and earn cash back for paying invoices by credit. I was brought in to design it.

The catch: the dev team was already building. The product concept was muddy. And the overworked product team didn't have bandwidth to slow down and reconsider the premise. I had to move fast and learn faster.

Before wireframing anything, I put together two simple slides and sat down with customers. No prototype, no polished deck — just enough to probe the core assumption: that accounting teams wanted to maximize rewards.

They didn't. What they actually wanted was simpler: visibility into where money was going, and an easier way to pay vendors. "Max rewards" was a Capital One framing, not a customer need.

Armed with what customers actually needed, I sketched around visibility and simplified payments — one-click payments, "Swift Pay" (a set-it-and-forget-it account funding model). I reviewed these early sketches directly with both the Capital One team and customers, which surfaced strong ideas quickly and got stakeholders aligned without lengthy review cycles.

As the design matured, I built wireframe prototypes for user testing and internal alignment — a shared reference that kept the dev team and product team moving in the same direction as the build accelerated.

The final product honored Capital One's clean brand while surfacing the spending visibility and payment simplicity customers had asked for. Early testing drew rave reviews. Max became one of Capital One's strongest business portfolio launches — taking the product from a 0.5% pre-UX margin to 1.5% post-UX, a 3x projected revenue lift.