Members of the BitGo design team at Config 2024
BitGo is one of the most secure and trusted custodians for digital assets. It’s products and APIs provide a platform for users to trade, settle, allocate, lend, and stake cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many others. BitGo products are built to comply with complex regulations across multiple countries and jurisdictions and are used by the likes Nike, who spun up hundreds of thousands of digital wallets to onboard it’s Swoosh members to NFTs; to providing token onboarding and custody services to Sui, a new layer-1 blockchain.
I joined BitGo in August of 2023 to lead the design team in developing the next generation of digital asset management tools. Our mostly remote team included three product designers and three brand designers that reported to me and I reported to the Head of Product. Later I hired additional product designers to meet our needs and complete our organizational structure. The team utilized Figma and an off-the-shelf design system, Untitled UI, for product design work. Project management was somewhat informal, relying on a mix of Google Sheets and Docs.
When I joined the team, a few things stood out. First, there was considerable chaos: design projects weren't tracked, project ownership and stakeholder roles were unclear, and project scopes often ballooned as new requirements were added. Conflicting priorities meant designers were working in parallel with engineering, leaving little time for design exploration, wireframing, or testing, and all projects were treated as urgent. This situation led to engineers making design decisions without the benefit of research or user experience considerations. Products usually shipped without design approval or quality assurance, and while some projects had minimal oversight, others faced significant disruptions due to unexpected shifts initiated by the CEO. Overall, there was little regard for the design process or the time of the designers.
Final FINAL!
The chaos at the process level was mirrored the craft level. Due to the constant pressure to ship, the team had little time for documentation or file management, making it hard for engineers and PMs to find current designs or identify sections needing coding. Design system updates were made randomly, without oversight, which confused frontend engineers. It felt like a kitchen that had no time to clean but was constantly cooking—utterly messy.
My final and perhaps most significant concern was company culture. After a recent downsizing, the team received little support from leadership, just the mantra to "try harder" and "do better." This created a climate of fear: fear of taking risks, trying new things, speaking up, and even fear of failure. This atmosphere fostered a lack of trust among peers and in leadership. Employees no longer trusted top-level decisions or product direction, nor did they believe they would receive the support needed to do their best work. This stifled innovation.
A lonely office
People are always afraid of the word “process”, stating that it adds complexity and takes time to implement and follow. Yet all work is a process and the right amount of process can accelerate a team’s output. Just like an assembly line added speed and consistency to automotive manufacturing, design is also a process of decision making which can lead to innovative and intuitive products, faster.
My starting goal at BitGo was to create a consistent process for product (and marketing) design. First was to implement a tool for tracking process. After auditing a few tools with the product, engineering, and IT teams, we settled on Jira as it was already in use by engineering. The goal was to make the management of the tool as light as possible so I implemented design request forms for starting new projects and automations for assigning and approving tasks. I also setup weekly checkins with PMs to make sure projects were on schedule and check for any potential interrupts. These projects rolled up to a Jira dashboard that leadership could review.
Figma project overview page showing design owner, Jira link, and other resources
Secondly, I worked closely with the Product team to add our design process to the product roadmap, that was then approved by the Director of Product & CEO. This gave time to the design team to research, understand, explore, and test product ideas. Along the way we identified decision checkpoints for stakeholders, users, and the CEO to solicit feedback to ensure projects were going in the right direction and verify ideas before finalizing designs for production.