Making one product out of a BNPL that ships like ten

One Experience. One Voice. Unmistakably Tamara.

Problem

Ten squads shipping into one consumer app and one business platform, with nobody owning how it all fit together.

Role

Staff designer on the central team.

Scope

Both sides of the marketplace, 13 designers, Arabic and English, every touchpoint including the audio experiences.

Result

A design system with an operating model that squads follow, a voice with six expressions and one rule, and a 166-touchpoint map that changed how Tamara communicates. Feature work unreleased; details on request.

Scope

I shape the experience and hold the bar

Not the screens, and not the business case: what the experience should be, and whether what ships meets it. Thirteen designers do the hands-on design. Grouped by the problem rather than the product, the territory looks like this:

  1. Money: how customers pay, pay back, and manage the methods they pay with.
  2. Trust and Safety: proving who you are to get in, and getting back in when you can't.
  3. Operations: what the people answering customer tickets see, and what they're able to do.
  4. Growth: what the app puts in front of you first, and what it asks you to do next.

One look

You can't review your way to consistency

One person can’t review their way to consistency across two products and ten squads. So most of my effort went into making the bar hold without me in the room:

  1. Operating model: intake, component lifecycle, definition of ready and done, versioning, built with the engineers who own it.
  2. Prototyping: skills that let designers and PMs build with real components from the first draft, so the first thing anyone sees already looks like the product.
  3. Shared patterns: the screens every squad builds, so they look like one product by default, not by correction.

One voice

Looking the same is only half of it

I defined what Tamara sounds like: the voice, six expressions, and the rules for holding that voice across surfaces and in both Arabic and English. The useful part isn’t the expressions themselves, it’s the rule for choosing between them. Every message starts from what the moment is for the customer, whether it’s news, something good, or something needed from them, and the volume rises only with the consequences. A top-up confirmation and a missed-payment warning come from the same voice; what changes is how much of it you hear.

The clearest test of that voice is the one with no screen at all. I designed and directed Tamara’s IVR and audio experience, so that someone calling in meets the same product they use in the app.

Vantage

Some problems only show up when you can see everything

Sitting across everything gives you a vantage point no squad has. I used it to:

  1. Map every communication Tamara sends: 166 touchpoints across 8 journey stages, which surfaced a pattern of long silence followed by too much noise.
  2. Frame the connective tissue: the experience layer between what squads ship, and the gaps in it that had been nobody’s job.

Detailed case studies for unreleased work available on request.