Market Data Product Platform & Design System
2025
The Challenge
Following a corporate restructuring, our new leadership sought to transform thirty years of custom market data expertise into a modular, white-label SaaS platform to drive immediate profitability. We faced a high-ambiguity, process-free (for better or worse) environment with a global, decentralized team and a mandate to return to profitability within months.
No “before” images because before was just nothing…like the universe itself.
My Role
As the newly promoted Head of Product Design, I engineered a new product design team from the ground up, transitioning designers from a custom shop mentality to a product-led systems mindset. I served as the primary bridge between Sales, Business Development, Engineering, and Data leadership to prioritize a perpetually shifting roadmap driven by immediate revenue requirements.
Strategy
Navigating Data Provider Complexity
Our biggest technical hurdle was Data Schema Fragmentation. While our platform was initially built on S&P Global’s robust data packages, 75% of the market utilized different, often cost-effective data providers like LSEG, FactSet, and Morningstar.
The LSEG Pivot: When our first major client required a switch to LSEG, my team had to immediately map new, fundamentally different data schemas to our existing modules.
Managing the Cascade: Because data calculation and availability differed across providers, we had to manage a cascade of UI variations. I leveraged our hyper-organized design system to allow for manageable creation of these variations—sometimes a simple toggle, other times a complete layout overhaul based on proprietary data points.
Technical Handshake: I partnered with Engineering to establish Design/Dev Parity, ensuring that the flexibility of our white-label variables matched the performance requirements of initial delivery contracts.
Strategic Talent Engineering
To navigate the shift from consultancy to product, I moved away from interchangeable design roles and focused on building a team based on complementary skill sets.
The Puzzle Piece Partnership: I empowered a superstar designer to serve as our organizational anchor, leveraging her brilliance in systematic thinking to establish the foundational structure of our working files while I focused on cross-functional influence, team advocacy, and strategic input.
Mentoring Through Transition: I utilized high-cadence coaching to help tenured designers reframe ambiguity as a creative lever. This included making the difficult decision to transition a designer back to familiar project work when the dual load of a new design stack (Figma) and a new methodology proved overwhelming, prioritizing her professional well-being and the team's velocity.
Result: Maintained exceptionally low team churn during multiple restructurings and fostered three internal promotions within the new product organization in one year.
Executive Diplomacy & Sales Alignment
In a Sales-led organization, I served as the critical buffer between urgent revenue demands and system scalability.
Proactive Communication: I established a proactive feedback loop with Business Development to ensure they understood how data provider variations affected the end product, enabling them to set accurate expectations with clients early in the sales cycle.
Revenue-First Prioritization: I successfully balanced the need for long-term platform robustness with the reality of "whoever is closest to signing a contract gets what they want first," ensuring our design efforts directly supported the company's survival.
The System
The modular containers for each "app" create a common foundation for consistency across layouts and implementations.
Buttons leveraged Figma Properties to allow for an extensive array of combinations with limited Variants required.
Tables are a uniquely challenging component to systematize given the variations necessary, especially in finance.
Systematized charts are complicated, but much better than doing them from scratch every time – as our company had done for years as a custom shop.
All the system element categories thus far.
Robust documentation included explaining not just how to use the system, but why.
A variable export plugin allowed for plug-and-play style sheets to make production code match Figma designs.
Typography was intentionally limited to avoid exploding complexity in v1 of the system.
Four breakpoints allowed for traditional device format considerations as well as multi-column masonry layouts on desktop of our modular apps.
Radius and spacing were a level of detail that product and development questioned the need for…but my experience with client design teams told me they would be essential.
The Product
All apps were designed across four breakpoints and accounting for edge cases, empty states, and interaction views
Some apps were relatively simple, displaying a single view of data or accounting for standard drill down behavior, like in the Sectors & Industries app.
Other apps, like Alerts, required multiple views for consumption of content…
…management of preferences…
…and CRUD workflows that varied in complexity according to the context and data.
When combined with the design system modification workflow, any core app could be updated to match a client's visual language within seconds.
Our team of 6 created full designs for over 200 unique, dev aligned, rapidly stylizeable apps in roughly 8 months.
Impact
Revenue
Drove a 34% YoY revenue increase by successfully launching a modular platform that met the diverse data needs of the market’s largest brokerages and mid-market financial advisory firms alike.
Speed to Market
Dramatically reduced implementation lead times by transitioning from one-off, custom code to a flexible, code-matched, white-label framework that eliminated subjective styling decisions and code hunting.
Scalability
Established a solid foundation that allowed for the expansion of implementation in North America and APAC (soon to be EMEA as well), proving the robustness of our modular market data offering.