From solo designer to design org

One designer; No team, no process.

Here's how I built a design function at Hometap,
and made it central to the company’s DNA.

Business context

Hometap is a Boston-based fintech company founded in 2017 with a mission to make homeownership less stressful and more accessible. Its flagship product, a Home Equity Investment (HEI), offers homeowners a way to access the equity in their home without taking on debt or monthly payments. In exchange, Hometap receives a share of the home’s future value.

What began as a single product has grown into a platform serving over 22,000 homeowners, with more than $2.3 billion deployed in home equity investments. The company expanded its suite in 2022 with the Home Equity Dashboard — a digital platform that helps homeowners understand, protect, and grow their equity at every stage of their homeowership journey.

The challenge

Home Equity Investment is a relatively new financial category. Unlike the more established mortgages and HELOCs, HEIs require significant education. It is of the utmost importance that homeowners are confident in their understanding of the product, and in deciding if an HEI is right for them.

This creates a unique design challenge that sits at the intersection of financial literacy, regulatory compliance, trust-building, and conversion optimization. Every screen, every sentence, and every interaction must balance legal precision with human clarity — a bar that rises with each new product Hometap launches, the evolving regulatory landscape and and each new customer segment the company serves.

As the company scaled from its first handful of investments to thousands of users per year, the design function had to evolve just as fast. I evolved the team from generalist supportive layer into a strategic function woven into product, growth, and business decisions.

Our evolution from startup support to strategic function

Phase 1: Laying the foundation (2019–2020)

When I started my journey at Hometap, I was a team of one and embedded directly into the founding team’s workflow. The company had secured its first funding round in 2018, and the priority was proving the HEI model could work — that homeowners wanted and would trust this new kind of financial product.

The initial design effort focused on building our core conversion funnel: helping homeowners move from curiosity → inquiry → application → investment. At this stage, the company was small and scrappy. Decisions were made quickly, always in close collaboration with my peers in engineering, marketing, and sales, with rapid iteration based on direct homeowner feedback. My toolkit was lean: I used Figma for mockups, lightweight usability testing, and a very heavy reliance on the investment managers (IMs) who spoke directly with homeowners every day.

This phase established the foundational principles that would define the team’s DNA: design at Hometap existed to translate complex financial products into clear, trustworthy experiences.

Phase 2: Framing (2021–2023)

Despite a pandemic, a shift to remote work, and investment headwinds, Hometap was able to cross critical growth milestones. We surpassed $1 billion in deployed investments by early 2024.

The design team grew with the business and underwent its first structural transformation; I transitioned the team from a handful of scrappy generalists to a crew with differentiated roles. I built out formal career pathing and areas of specialization. Together with the Head of Product, I co-created a stakeholder education program that clarified how and when cross-functional partners should engage with the product discovery process. I also introduced our first formalized product discovery framework establishing and documenting our execution bar. I created process scaffolding that could apply to all projects, regardless of their complexity.

The 2022 launch of the Home Equity Dashboard marked a turning point for our product. For the first time, Hometap was designing not just a conversion funnel but created an ongoing digital relationship with homeowners. We built a platform to help people understand their equity, track their investment, and navigate decisions over years, not minutes.

During this period, the team also began our early exploration of AI. A 2023 design sprint produced two concepts, "Home CFO" (an AI-powered financial advisor), and a conversational assistant for the dashboard. These sprints laid early groundwork for AI-informed design thinking at Hometap.

Phase 3: Building for scale (2024–2025)

By 2024, Hometap’s product surface had expanded dramatically. The company is now designing for multiple user types (homeowners, internal team members, channel partners, and investors), across multiple products in an increasingly regulated multi-state environment. The design team matches that complexity with specialized capabilities: Our team is structured around four sub-disciplines: Product Design, Content Design, Experience Design, and UX Research. Our (still small, still scrappy) team of nine operates in a pod model with cross-cutting functions that ensure consistency across all product surfaces. To combat information siloing or key person dependencies, designers share context across the full scope and pick up projects based on availability, skillset, and learning opportunity. This structure allows our team to remain lean and nimble while covering our expanding product surface.


Phase 4: An AI evolution (2026 — )

2026 has represented a year of rapid transformation when it comes to how we work. We’ve been following AI evolution closely, and gradually layering it into our process as it has made sense to do so. While we’ve been using AI to help us with PRDs, test plan creation, and research synthesis for some time, Claude code / design have introduced a huge unlock for us when it comes to prototyping. No longer limited by static prototypes which simulate real experiences, we are witnessing in real time as the gap between “concept” and “testable experience” collapses.

And so we're learning faster; validating concepts and building project alignment in days instead of months. We are testing more versions, and moving to PRDs with more confidence and less guesswork. Speed isn't solely an operational win, research is influencing and de-risking our biggest bets.

This year, so far:

  • 8 AI enabled studies launched since March. Fun fact: We averaged about 1 study a month in 2025. We are on track to do about 3x that this year)

  • ~48 hours average time from launch to learnings

  • 5 big-bet projects directly influenced by this research

Some design challenges — 
and how we’ve handled them

Explaining a New Financial Category

The HEI is not a loan, not a HELOC, and not a reverse or second mortgage. Designing the Estimate experience (the moment a homeowner first sees what their investment could look like in terms of pricing) required the team to design a complex tool to build comprehension without creating overwhelm. The team invested heavily in research-backed content design, ensuring complex concepts are contextualized with progressive explanations, plain-language explanations, and interactive visualizations.

Navigating Regulatory Complexity

As Hometap expands into licensed states, every screen needs legal and compliance review. The design team has built a close working relationship with these teams, embedding regulatory requirements into the design process early rather than treating them as a last-mile review gate. Content design plays a critical role here, translating legally required disclosures into language that homeowners can actually understand, and ensuring consistency across every product surface.

Designing for self-serve at scale

Historically, Investment Managers (our sales team) have guided homeowners through the process in a high-touch, consultative model. As Hometap scales, we need to recalibrate this approach, crafting an experience that allows IM capacity to scale as well. The design team has been busy architecting a self-serve Homeowner experience that can replace much of what an IM does — while maintaining the trust, clarity, and confidence that human guidance provides. This effort spans a huge product surface, and represents one of the team’s most ambitious ongoing initiatives to date.

Building a design system for a growing platform

With nine designers bringing different approaches, levels of experience, and design sensibilities to an expanding product ecosystem, the team recognized the need for a centralized design system. A Design System Lead role was created to establish cohesive guidelines for typography, color, iconography, and component usage. As we build out our AI processes and practices, having these pieces codified has been immensely helpful.

Integrating emerging tech into our design practice

Within Hometap, the design team has been one of the earliest adopters of AI tooling and workflow enhancement, using them to accelerate prototyping, generate variations, and explore concepts faster. Even as the company has grown and added more stakeholders, our team continues to prioritize rapid iteration from prototype to test. AI-assisted design has become a key enabler of that velocity.

Impact to date

  • Scaled the design team from a single generalist (myself) to a 9-person multi-disciplinary team spanning product design, content design, experience design, and UX research.

  • Supported $2.3B+ in deployed investments across 22,000+ homeowners by designing the end-to-end digital experience for both homeowners and our internal originations team.

  • Launched the Home Equity Dashboard in 2022, transforming Hometap from a transactional product into a long-term digital relationship with homeowners.

  • Operationalized the design process with formal discovery workflows, skills and growth matrices, and a structured research function — enabling the team to maintain quality and velocity as complexity increases.

  • Lead conception of a self-serve investment experience designed to reduce reliance on investment manager-led processes while maintaining homeowner trust and comprehension.

  • Built out a design system to ensure consistency across a rapidly expanding product surface spanning multiple products, user types, and regulatory environments.

In Summary

In In a way, the design team's trajectory mirrors Hometap's own: from proving a concept to scaling a category. As the company enters its next phase (expanding into new states, launching new products, deepening its platform) design is no longer a service function. It's a strategic lever.

I started with a simple brief: help homeowners understand and a financial product they've never heard of. From there, I've built a design practice centered on helping people make confident decisions about one of the biggest assets they'll ever own. Every touchpoint, from the first website visit to the Home Equity Dashboard, is shaped by that responsibility.