Ten years, itemised

PagAmerican is a SaaS payments platform operating as Merchant of Record in the U.S. market, serving sellers who trade internationally. It concentrates checkout, payments, tax compliance and risk management in one place — which means the platform, not the seller, carries the legal responsibility for every transaction it processes.

I joined as the fourth hire and the company’s first designer. There was no PM on the team and no prior design function: the entire brand fit in a folder with one logo and two PDFs of brand colours. Six months later the platform processed its first payment; six months after that it had paying customers.

My scope covered four fronts. Design — discovery, information architecture, navigation taxonomy, flows, interface, design system and UX writing. Product — roadmap, prioritization, scope negotiation, and the business rules behind each flow. Delivery — writing every card with context and acceptance criteria, handing off to engineering, and reviewing implementation before release. Alignment — immersion sessions with the founders, biweekly playbooks for leadership, and documenting decisions so they could be revisited rather than relitigated.

Where the platform stands today: 20+ products, roughly 44 flows, 70+ screens and 260+ state variations.

Product and discovery

• Defined the platform’s entity taxonomy before any screen existed — what the product is made of, how the pieces relate, and who owns each one. Separating product from offer turned out to be the most expensive decision to undo, because it determined navigation, permissions and tracking.
• Ran a company-wide prioritisation of 69 initiatives across six avenues against a single north star, with 16 key results carrying real baselines, scored by RICE.
• Wrote the specs, acceptance criteria and engineering-ready cards behind the affiliates module, funnel management, the order lifecycle and collaborator provisioning.
• Turned recurring conversations with the founders and with compliance and operations into product requirements — the founders knew the problem deeply, but nobody had translated that knowledge into anything buildable.

Design

• Led the checkout, the product’s revenue engine. To attack failed payments I mapped 154 issuer and network decline codes from processor documentation into 23 use cases — 60% of them things the buyer could resolve alone — and designed a recovery path for each, while deliberately exposing nothing that confirms the state of the card, because under Merchant of Record the loss from card testing lands on the platform.
• Designed the financial experience around a 10% hold released after 90 days and a 60-day refund window: four separate balances, a release schedule navigable down to the originating order, and per-order deductions showing tax, affiliate commission and platform fee where the value was created.
• Restructured order status into two parallel tracks — financial and logistical — so an order that is delivered and being refunded at the same time reads correctly, with every event recording its author.
• Designed the affiliate programme as a per-product structure rather than a global one, with separate dashboards for the business owner and the affiliate.
• Designed permission groups mapped to real business functions, so account owners could stop sharing a single login across their team.
• Moved heavy compliance documentation out of onboarding and into the payout flow, where intent is high and verification actually means something.
• Led early exploration for the company’s first mobile app, and made the call not to build it — the web experience covered the essential, and the app needed a dedicated team that did not exist.

Design System and AI tooling

• Built PADS, the company’s design system, from zero: 32 components and 240 tokens across three layers, light and dark from day one, zero hardcoded colours, built on an accessible foundation that resolved keyboard behaviour from the start.
• Designed the pipeline that produces it — a Figma frame goes in, the step that decides reuse happens before any code is generated, and a registered component comes out. Verification blocks: four automated eval suites, a design review, a code review and a contrast check in CI.
• Connected Figma, GitHub and Notion through an MCP layer so specs, acceptance criteria and handoff cards stopped being manual work.
• Measured the unit economics of building with AI directly from session transcripts: US$6.23 per component, 41 pull requests in roughly five weeks.

Brand and content

• Owned every brand touchpoint: visual identity and guidelines, the icon and illustration systems, marketing websites, and the transactional email journeys around purchase and refund. Wrote the product copy and ran localization in two languages.

Ways of working

• Established the rituals the company didn’t have: a design–engineering sync twice a week where technical and product decisions meet, biweekly playbooks giving leadership visibility into what was being researched, decided and shipped, and a recurring implementation review before release.
• Kept a direct channel with every customer after onboarding, which surfaced not only bugs and questions but what people were trying to do next — observations that cut steps out of the product management flow.
• Created a taxonomy for UX debt and a fixed slot to work on it, so the small refinements that never win a normal prioritisation had a place to be built.

With over 30 million customers, Inter&Co offers a comprehensive range of services, including full banking solutions, investments, credit, insurance, and a marketplace connecting major retailers in Brazil and the United States. Its international presence is highlighted by operations in the U.S., providing financial services through partnerships and a global payments platform for efficient and secure international transactions.

I work as a UX/Product Designer at Inter&Co, focusing on the investment product tailored for the U.S. market. I investigate the unique characteristics of U.S. investors and conduct mapping to identify competitive opportunities. I consistently aim to design new components and user journeys that reduce time to value and enhance the perceived value of investments.

My role involves competitor analysis and the development of user experiences adapted to market expectations, emphasizing intuitive and accessible navigation. A key differentiator in this project has been the opportunity to work as a UX writer, contributing to the translation and localization of user flows in both English and Spanish.

Mercado Livre is a leading e-commerce platform in Latin America, operating in over 18 countries in the region, including Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, among others. Offering payment services through Mercado Pago and shipping technology, it promotes entrepreneurship, digital inclusion, and economic growth throughout Latin America by providing easy access to the market, technological innovation, and driving online commerce.

At Mercado Livre, I had the opportunity to work on the Mercado Pago app, creating end-to-end experiences for millions of users in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and Brazil. By understanding the needs and expectations of users in a B2C environment, my main focus was designing flows by analyzing various cases and their respective impacts in depth prioritizing excellence in storytelling and minimizing product friction.

Designing in a localized manner challenged me to understand the cultural nuances of each country. This experience taught me the importance of scalable and adaptable solutions.

We aim to translate stakeholders’ inputs into pleasant and successful experiences for users. In collaboration with UX writers, we identify opportunities in each use case, screen, action, and task in the flow to deliver a compelling narrative aligning business objectives with user goals.

Our product is available in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, and Brazil — and my contributions include:

• Decreasing the contact rate of users in Mexico (from 7% to 4%) and Brazil (from 9% to 6%), developing features that enhanced user experience, later replicated for Chile and Argentina;
• Compliance with Mexican regulatory requirements, developing features to set debit card payment limits and international billing settings;
• Increasing successful PIN changes for Mexican users (a 65% increase in confirmed PINs), reducing churn due to blocked cards;
• Reducing the number of blocked cards due to insufficient balance in subscription charges in Mexico, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina — we increased subscription payment compliance by 20% through cash entry;
• Standardization of components of the MP ecosystem, improving flows and interfaces across operating countries;
• Reviewing and iterating on the product’s value props, and creating a process to offer and generate awareness of our product more intelligently and assertively across different touchpoints;
• Mitigating the expectations of non-scored users who desire credit function, by providing more knowledge about debit as an available payment method;
• Reducing physical card issuance costs for users with low usage propensity — after deploying the solution in production, we reduced card issuance for this target by up to 60%;
• Optimization of our funnel to increase activation, reduce churn, and create user reactivation journeys;
• Integration of MP ecosystem features with our product to enhance engagement and encourage usage;
• Overhauling the entire IA of the product experience in Brazil, designing new interfaces. In collaboration with the Research team, we generated insights and validated several proposals through usability testing.

Hotmart is a comprehensive platform that enables individuals to create and sell their content online. A unicorn company since 2021, present in 8 countries, it recently reached the milestone of $10 billion in sales.

As a product designer at Hotmart, while working on a growth team within the Creators business unit, we faced the following challenges:

• Identifying and qualifying new users after sign-up; through the design of onboarding on the platform;
• Clustering users according to their behaviors and intentions in the product;
• Generating PQLs for stakeholders;
• Designing experiences and initial contexts following user goals;
• Measuring behaviors throughout the journey, ensuring frictionless access and mapping mobility/success patterns;
• Ensuring that the largest percentage of our target audience experiences our core values in the shortest time possible;
• Generating growth loops throughout the funnel conversion; increasing activation and retention, using engagement models;
• Mapping hypotheses and generating experiments following specific OKRs.

My actions at the UX role were:

• Research, interviews, and quantitative analysis, and discovery as a significant part of the initial process;
• Designing alternatives for A/B tests and multivariate tests for users to experience our core value according to their intention — we scaled over 42 experiments in 2 years;
• Designing personalized experiences oriented by profile and journey moment — we delivered user onboarding and specific communications by segment through the notification center on the platform;
• Mapping the user journey from sign-up to habit moment;
• Facilitating workshops involving cross-functional areas and skills — such as CX, marketing, revenue, and finance teams;
• High and low-fidelity prototypes, using core components of the design system;
• Information architecture mapping, considering routes and journey flows through the service scope;
• Data analysis related to product usability: GA events, heatmaps, and KPIs related to our specific journeys and funnels;
• User story creation, hand-off, quality assurance, and support for the development team.

Other highlights and contributions:

• Creation of playbooks for the Chapter, sharing knowledge about the product, users, and their behaviors.
• Onboarding of new employees, introducing them to the Hotmart customer journey and how this topic connects with each area’s deliveries as well as with the organizational structure, demonstrating extensive knowledge of the product, business, and company as a whole.

As a experience designer at Hotmart, I worked across the AARRR funnel—impacting products and features through effective user communications—within the Product Marketing team. Collaborating with copywriters and videomakers, we effectively contributed to the following deliveries:

• Development of product pages aimed at acquiring new Hotmart users;
• Redesign of the Help Center’s information architecture, including user interviews and UI development, as well as the implementation of an in-app helper within the web platform;
• Support and assistance to other product designers in the design and implementation of products, contributing to a faster and more efficient roadmap;
• Customization of product and feature presentations for stakeholders, business developers, and webinars;
• Development of infographics and other assets aimed at educating users about product features;
• Production of materials for the Hotmart app listings on Google Play and the Apple Store, including mockup development, layout design, and image adaptation for various devices;
• Creation of campaigns focused on Hotmart product launches and activations, considering user journeys and their progression to new performance levels through our features;
• Development of materials for seasonal and international expansion campaigns;
• Creation of storyboards for launch campaigns, guides, and tutorials for solutions developed by Hotmart;
• Establishment of the Hotmart Help Center channel on YouTube, including the development of channel identity, thumbnails, and video storyboards.