Design Team Lead · Visa
Visa Developer
Center
Led design for Visa’s developer platform — from a tiger team to a standing function — and moved the Developer Center from Visa’s org chart onto the jobs developers actually finish: find a capability, get set up, make a first call.
The starting point
The Visa Developer Center is the primary interface between Visa’s API ecosystem and the developers at fintechs and banks who build on top of it. When this project started, the site had grown organically alongside Visa’s internal structure: navigation and content architecture mirrored how Visa was organized, not how developers needed to move through it.
A tiger team was formed to change that. I led design end-to-end — first as one of a small group defining the vision, then hiring and building the dedicated design team that carried it through execution. Our team formed the experience strategy and planned the execution.
Built for Visa’s org chart, not developers
Developers experienced the depth of Visa’s API offerings as complexity. Finding the right starting point for a given integration meant navigating Visa’s org chart, not your own use case. Stripe had already set the bar for what a best-in-class developer experience looked like; enterprise-grade didn’t have to mean hard to navigate.
Testing the assumptions
We checked our assumptions with real developers at each phase — confirming the new information architecture served newcomers without losing the engineers already deep in an existing partnership, and surveying whether the visual direction read as modern as the functionality underneath.
Standing up a team to ship it
The tiger team moved fast and validated direction quickly, but shipping it required a different kind of team — one that could sustain quality across a large, complex site over months of execution. I hired for range: designers who could move between systems-level thinking and detailed component work, understood the developer audience, and could hold their own with engineering without needing decisions translated.
What shipped was a new information architecture, a new visual system for the portal, new documentation templates, and a component library that made ongoing additions manageable.
Seeing more
The screens and numbers behind this project aren’t public yet — happy to walk through them.