Colombia had no digital-native bank. Traditional institutions were digitizing old processes instead of rethinking them — hidden fees, opaque interest calculations, and impersonal service had eroded trust across the financial system. There was room for a bank built mobile-first, from the ground up. But that meant building more than a product — it meant building the team and the design practice to sustain it.
I joined at moment zero, before the bank had a name. My focus was experimentation and executive alignment: running the testing cadence that shaped the product, and translating research into decisions leadership could act on. Alongside that, I recruited and built the bank's first product design team.
Early builds ran under a placeholder name — enough to learn how much emotional weight a real brand would carry for users. We ran workshops with the team and bank leadership to shortlist names; one of the bank's founders proposed Lulo, a fruit native to Colombia grown nowhere else in the world. It carried the idea of ‘distinctly Colombian’ before a single asset was designed. A Colombian branding studio then translated that identity into the visual system.
I established the foundational components of what would become Lulo's design system — not a mature system yet, but the base everything else would build on — and designed the bank's first onboarding and account-creation flow, the backbone the rest of the product extended from. We ran multiple versions through biweekly testing with prospective users, iterating until it accounted for the specific frictions of the Colombian banking system. In parallel, I recruited and trained Lulo's first design team — talent that stayed with the product for years after I moved on.
600K+ users and counting. Pockets, the savings feature shaped by early product decisions, became one of the app's most-used tools. The bank now holds some of the highest Customer Satisfaction scores in Colombia's financial sector — built and delivered with the founding product team.
[Rascunho — personalize antes de publicar] Founding a design practice and a product at the same time means there is no internal reference to lean on — every convention, from naming to component structure, gets set by the decisions made in the first weeks. The harder skill wasn't the craft itself; it was learning to move at 0→1 speed while keeping bank founders and executives aligned on decisions that would outlast any single release.
