Shaping design culture and craft in a crypto scaleup
Company
Ramp Network
INDUSTRY
Crypto fintech
MY ROLE
Head of Design
PROJECT TIMELINE
2022 - 2025
COMPANY SIZE
Series B scaleup
THE CONTEXT
From scattered freelancers to a high-trust, high-impact team
When I joined Ramp, there was no design team.
Just a scattered network of freelancers and agencies working in silos. Each product squad had their own stopgap resource, which led to inconsistent quality, duplicated effort, and design that didn’t scale.
Design wasn’t seen as a strategic lever. It was a service line. Reactive, fragmented, and easy to ignore.
My first challenge was to shift that perception. I needed to build a design team that did more than avoid problems. It had to unlock product momentum, bring clarity to ambiguity, and earn trust by delivering at speed.
I focused on creating a team of generalists with deep craft, strong product sense, and shared standards. People who could embed deeply in squads and raise the bar from day one. This was my second time building a team from scratch. I knew where the pitfalls were.
And I was ready to do it better.
The mission was clear:
Chapter 1: Team Rituals
Staying aligned without burning time
To strengthen cohesion without fragmenting focus, I designed a lightweight rhythm of rituals — a mix of weekly anchors and ad-hoc moments — that supported collaboration without overwhelming calendars.
All together, these rituals were designed to take no more than 20% of a designer’s week, leaving the remaining 80% for deep, uninterrupted work inside product squads. The goal wasn’t just alignment — it was amplification: multiplying the impact of each designer by giving them clarity, feedback, and a sense of team beyond their immediate squad.
Each ritual had a clear purpose — whether it was surfacing blockers, building shared standards, reflecting on process, or simply staying human in a remote environment. We kept things consistent but minimal. Enough to stay tight. Never enough to feel like overhead.
The visual map below shows how we structured these moments — each one intentionally crafted to create trust, reduce friction, and raise the bar without slowing us down.
🔁 Design stand-up
45mins • Weekly on Mondays
A pulse on the entire org. Designers shared blockers, progress, and decisions. I shared hiring updates, strategic context, and my own design work.
👀 Critique session
1h • Weekly on Wednesdays
Weekly design critique with one presenter, shared ahead of time. I joined regularly with my own work, helping normalize vulnerability and model feedback culture.
🤔 Design Retro
1h • Monthly on Friday
Focused on systems, not individuals. We reflected on what worked and what needed change, then followed through with actions — sometimes empowering designers, sometimes escalating directly to leadership.
🎙️ Remote “open mic”
45mins • Weekly on Fridays
Optional space for casual connection — half watercooler, half peer support. Helped maintain team identity in a remote setup.
📝 Design × Product reviews
45mins • Bi-weekly on Wednesday
Designers and PMs co-presented to CPO and peers. This aligned cross-functional teams and surfaced opportunities and risks early.
🗣️ 1:1 sessions
45mins • Bi-weekly on Wednesday
Designers and PMs co-presented to CPO and peers. This aligned cross-functional teams and surfaced opportunities and risks early.
chapter 2: Tools and Systems
Shared frameworks empowered designers to move fast with confidence
As we grew, we needed more than great individuals — we needed shared infrastructure. I led the creation of foundational artifacts that enabled speed, consistency, and autonomy:
👌 Design principles
Practical, crypto-aware principles that guided everything from critiques to hiring. Examples included: “Design to prevent mistakes” and “Bring Web2 simplicity to Web3.”
📝 UX writing guidelines
Practical, crypto-aware principles that guided everything from critiques to hiring. Examples included: “Design to prevent mistakes” and “Bring Web2 simplicity to Web3.”
🧩 Design system
Built and scaled a system with engineers — speeding up delivery, improving consistency, and reducing cognitive load for everyone.
📈 Career growth framework
Clear expectations for each level, including invisible work like facilitation and systems thinking. Helped designers plan growth and gave me a structure for feedback.
🧜♀️ Customer personas
Ramp Design Principles reimagined as cards
We turned our core principles into collectible-style cards — inspired by Magic the Gathering or Pokemon — aimed
to make them more memorable and easier to reference in everyday conversations, especially on Slack and during feedback.
THE RESULTS
Design became a trusted, strategic function inside Ramp
In three years, we transformed from chaos to clarity. The design team grew from freelancers to a fully embedded, high-performing org with strong process and shared values.
Design became a key voice in product conversations. Not because we demanded a seat, but because we consistently delivered. Internal surveys showed top scores in trust, clarity, and alignment. Designers reported the highest understanding of company strategy and the strongest sense of role satisfaction.
More than delivering features, we delivered systems, standards, and structure. The company no longer saw design as polish — they saw it as leverage.
testimonial
Jakub Dziedzic
Lead product designer at Ramp network