Design systems
Design systems
UX / UI
Team building
Santander Portugal
Transforming fragmented design efforts into a unified, scalable practice—building community, accelerating delivery, and bringing user-centered thinking to the heart of Portugal’s largest private bank.
Overal stats
Main collaborators
25 designers
9 Product Managers
3 major departments, within 40 plus projects
Business focus area
Multiple lines of business with different goals
Increase speed of delivery and output quality
Create a consistent team
UX Focus areas
Global Navigation
Design system improvement
Usability improvement
Outcomes
Increased the team from 6 to 25 multidisciplinary designers
NPS score increased from 34 to a 55.5 NPS score for the web logged in experience and from 27 to 54.3 for the mobile app
15% growth in digital customers
Increase speed of design delivery by 30%
Situation and my role
Santander Portugal is the largest privately-owned retail bank in the country, serving millions of customers through its digital platforms. I joined as UX Chapter Lead to support six designers working across NetBanco (responsive web) and My Santander (native apps for iOS and Android), focusing on logged-in account management experiences.
It quickly became clear that my role would extend far beyond the initial scope.
Where I was asked to support a plethora of internal apps, the mortgage contracting process, temporary marketing campaigns...
Actions
Established Strategic Design Leadership
I escalated the urgent need for a cohesive design language and team structure to C-level and senior directors, while fostering a sense of belonging and purpose among all in-house designers. This effort led to:
- Unifying the existing team under a shared culture,
- Scaling the design function from 6 to 25 professionals, including:
- Product Designers
- UX Researchers
- UX Writers
- DesignOps support
Scaling with intention
To ensure quality and velocity across initiatives, I applied best-practice ratios:
1 UX Researcher per 5 Product Designers
1 UX Writer per 8 Designers
Centralized DesignOps and Visual System support per 10–15 Designers
This enabled:
Balanced support for both internal and customer-facing projects,
Embedded research and content thinking early in the process,
Improved consistency, clarity, and accessibility across flows.
Pioneered adoption of Group Design System
I collaborated with international design leadership, aligning with their goal of creating a global design system. I successfully positioned Portugal as the pioneer market for the Flame Design System, allowing me to reframe in-progress projects to benefit from reusable components and scalable design patterns.
We applied Flame to:
- The new mortgage contracting journey
- Several internal tools
- Santander’s new corporate website—the first full experience built entirely on the system
- From that moment onwards all initiated projects used the same visual language
This drove significant improvements in velocity and consistency.
As an individual contribuitor
As an individual contribuitor
I redesigned from the ground up the process for new digital account opening process. A very high-stake program for Santander as for over 20 months, no one could finished and it was passed around between multiple product owners
Tasks
- Conducted a heuristic evaluation exposing tech-first, user-last decisions,
- Convinced leadership to restart the project from scratch,
- Defined a lean MVP with a new product manager,
- Led an intense 4-month redesign sprint to meet a critical September deadline—in time for the influx of university students opening new accounts tied to student ID issuance.
Results
Delivery Efficiency: Projects using the Flame design system saw an estimated 30% improvement in delivery speed.
Team Growth: Scaled from 6 to 25 multidisciplinary professionals across design, research, and content.
Strategic Reach: Supported 40+ initiatives across web, mobile, and internal systems.
Design Culture: Created a robust, supportive design community with mentorship, rituals, and shared standards.
Business Impact: Successfully delivered a critical user journey that enabled thousands of students to open bank accounts on time for university intake.
Other projects
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