understanding of design’s rel-
evance to the business. So early
on, I would start every update
on our team’s progress with a
slide that literally had nothing
on it. And I would say, “This is
the summary of all the PayPal
revenue achieved without the
aid of design.” Everyone got the
point. Most important, the folks
in UED began to feel like part-
ners in the business, not just
order takers. To further rein-
force the business-partner men-
tality, we held regular quarterly
all-hands meetings in which we
reviewed performance versus
plan on key design objectives
like design standards deploy-
ment, right along with sharing
PayPal financial performance
to plan (revenue, profitability,
etc.). Everyone on the team
began to see how our work on
key projects was contributing to
PayPal’s financial results, which
reinforced design as a business
partner. Sharing project work
publicly with the whole team
on a quarterly basis again rein-
forced how important it was for
all design functions (visual, UI,
research, analytics, writing, etc.)
to work together to get the cus-
tomer experience right in order
to achieve the business results.
For example, to deliver an effec-
tive PayPal sign-up page/form,
the form fields have to be sen-
sible, the writing must be clear
and understandable, the visuals
need to be brand-aligned, and
the experience instrumented in
support of measuring conver-
sion and capturing customer
feedback. Yes, it’s a simple
concept, but PayPal had grown
so fast that we hadn’t taken
the time to get our collabora-
tive execution synchronized.
It became increasingly clear
that getting it done was key to
achieving the kind of checkout
conversion improvements we
were looking for on our payment
flows and sign-up flows, glob-
ally.