Modularity Virtual Cards

As the Founding Designer of Modularity I led design from the ground up, helping build a collaborative financial platform that simplified complex financial workflows into intuitive, high-impact user experiences. One of our most used and impactful features was Virtual Cards, which gave clients complete control over spending and enabled more accurate budget forecasting and reporting.

My role

  • Founding Designer

  • Director

  • Researcher

  • People Manager

Building the Design team

As the founding designer based in the United States, I was responsible for building and leading a globally distributed design team in Kyiv, Ukraine, while closely collaborating with our development team located in Brazil. Managing a fully distributed team across multiple time zones required intentional processes and a strong culture of trust, communication, and collaboration.

From the start, I focused on hiring designers who not only had strong craft skills, but who also thrived in fast-moving startup environments where ambiguity and iteration were part of daily life. Once the team was in place, I implemented clear structures for mentorship, design reviews, and feedback loops to ensure that every designer had the support and guidance they needed to grow in their role.

Establishing a foundation

As the founding designer at a financial technology startup, I was responsible for building not only the product, but the entire design foundation the company would scale on. Financial systems are complex by nature — they involve highly regulated data, sensitive transactions, and diverse user groups with very different needs.

At Modularity we moved fast. Speed was critical to hit milestones, secure funding, and meet customer expectations — but stability couldn’t be sacrificed. To accelerate development and maintain consistency, I built a UI library that combined the efficiency of Tailwind components with the flexibility of custom components and CSS tokens. Tailwind provided a lightweight, utility-first foundation that allowed us to move quickly while keeping the codebase clean and maintainable.

Discovering the right problems to solve

I ran weekly discovery sessions with Neuralink’s animal care team to deeply understand their workflows, financial processes, and day-to-day challenges. These conversations allowed us to quickly test early concepts, prioritize the most impactful ideas, and stay tightly aligned with the needs of the people using the product.

Through this ongoing discovery, we identified Virtual Cards as a key solution to simplify spend management, improve control over vendor purchases, and increase budget forecasting accuracy. Validating this concept directly with the team gave us confidence to prioritize development and deliver a feature that solved a real problem while driving strong adoption.

Designing and Testing the Virtual Cards Feature

Once Virtual Cards emerged as a high-impact solution, I led the end-to-end design of the feature — translating complex financial controls into a simple, intuitive experience that non-financial users could easily adopt. My focus was on giving teams granular control over spending while keeping the setup process clear and approachable.

I created interactive prototypes to simulate real-world use cases, allowing us to test the full experience with the animal care team before development began. These sessions provided valuable feedback on card creation flows, spend limits, approval processes, and reporting views. By testing early and often, we were able to refine edge cases, simplify workflows, and ensure that the feature met both the operational and financial needs of the team.

The result was a highly flexible Virtual Cards system that empowered teams to confidently manage spend in real time, reduced reconciliation overhead, and fed directly into more accurate forecasting — all without overwhelming users with unnecessary complexity.

Conclusion

The Virtual Cards feature is a strong example of how continuous discovery, collaborative design, and early prototyping can turn complex financial workflows into simple, intuitive solutions that deliver real value. By staying close to users and iterating early, we created a flexible tool that empowered teams to better control spend, reduce operational overhead, and improve forecasting accuracy.

Equally important, the work I invested upfront to lay a strong design foundation — from scalable systems to clear processes — allowed us to move quickly and confidently as we built new features. This foundation made it possible to successfully manage a globally distributed team of designers and collaborate seamlessly with development teams across multiple time zones, including the U.S., Ukraine, and Brazil. The result was not only a successful product, but a highly coordinated, high-performing team able to deliver complex solutions at startup speed.