Synaps

Introduction

In 2021, I joined Synaps as the first designer and employee. My primary role was to design and strengthen their existing products and services.

The company’s mission is to assists users at any stage of their online activities: by helping them to remain anonymous or prove their identity for compliance purposes through identity verification (KYC) and business verification (KYB).

To help users stay anonymous, we developed in parallel an experimental product called: Anima. An application that allows everyone to prove their identity without disclosing its content thanks to the decentralization of identity.

My role

The team grew very quickly and I had the opportunity to build and lead the design team, overseeing two UX designers and two brand designers for two years. I focused on growing the design team by setting up rituals, workflows, best practices, and emphasizing communication.

My main task was to mentor and inspire the team, giving them a lot of autonomy so that they could surpass themselves in their craft. Since I like to be hands-on, this autonomy allowed me to spend some time building alongside them.

In the span of two years, we designed and maintained three complex client-facing products with their respective dashboards, an internal tool to allow our verifiers to correctly verify the users’ clients, many experimental projects, and several rebrandings.

Some of these projects had a worldwide audience, with several hundred thousand users using them. This forced us to craft simple and understandable products that could be used by anyone from any country.

Learnings

As our design team expanded, I discerned that each new addition increased not only our work capacity but also introduced more contrasts and noise. A team isn’t just a collection of individuals. We fostered a common language and working approach that helped us overcome these challenges and enhance our collaboration.

Located at the nexus of technology, business, product development, support, and marketing often introduced difficulties in satisfying all expectations. Consequently, we evolved our common language into a design system - a bedrock for us and our collaborators.

This simplified harmonization with developers, as we shared common terminologies and components. Our design system facilitated each rebranding process for the marketing team, thanks to its multi-brand adaptability. From a product perspective, it accelerated the feature development and empowered us to effectively handle business challenges.

The research process and philosophy were one of the main components that I infused in our common language and that I’ve embedded in the design system. Each crafted component, feature, and product had to be a verified hypothesis.

This experience reinforced the belief that fostering common understanding and creating adaptable systems are not merely options - they are essential tools for navigating the complex challenges of growth and change in the fast-paced tech industry.