Processed $40M a year, ~$135M over my tenure. 200,000 users. 40 countries.
Open Collective is a financial platform that lets grassroots communities raise and spend money in the open. By the time I left it was moving around $40M a year, roughly $135M over my tenure, across 15,000 collectives and 200,000 people in more than 40 countries.
Open Collective started as my client at Tafka, the digital agency I co-founded. After a few successful projects and a few years, I ended up leading design operations for the organization.
The main goal: enable communities to raise money and spend it transparently, with strong admin capabilities covering bookkeeping and compliance for fiscal hosts. We needed a multi user financial platform serving contributors, collective admins and fiscal host admins, a public website presenting Collective profiles to communities and driving contributions in, and multiple sensitive flows such as submitting and tracking expenses, managing collective finances, and downloading bookkeeping proof for compliance.
Most of my work was turning that abstraction into concrete product value proposals to empower communities to be more resilient and better prepared for their challenges. The surfaces were dense: expense submission and approval, payouts, transaction detail, monthly invoices, contribution and checkout, permissions, and a data export tool letting people select from 67 fields across 71,000 rows.
I designed and scaled the design system and kept it at 1:1 parity with production, publishing updates continuously and working directly against the engineering team's implementation. On top of that, given the open source nature of the project, the design side had to be open as well to people from the communities powering it. We maintained and scaled it with multiple contributors from very different cultural backgrounds.
All of this work included documenting the reasoning behind it in UX manuals, research pieces, data tables and facilitated workshops.
As head of design I built the design team. I hired, coached and empowered new designers, and I set the quality bar. I defined the design culture and practices, then made sure they were actually used.
My work also covered branding for Open Collective and its connected initiatives, including two fiscal hosts: Open Source Collective and Open Collective Europe, shaping how the company and its services presented visually.