Sympla.
Design leadership for one of Brazil's largest ticketing platforms, measured by customer pain and not by output.
- Head of Product Design, then also Group Product Manager, Mobile
- 2022 to 2024
4 designers. Six months in, also Group Product Manager for mobile, with 4 engineers. In 2023, product satisfaction reached 85% (up 5 points) and brand promotion 79% (up 13 points). The design team moved up a full level on the NN/g UX maturity model.
The team
I promoted three of the four designers. One-to-ones every two weeks as the base, and the cadence adjusted to each person: weekly when someone needed it, further apart when not.
The problem, and the constraint
A consumer marketplace at high traffic, where the expensive moments are payment, fraud and the ticket itself. Six months in, I also took product management for mobile, so the decisions about what shipped were mine as well as the design.
The choice, and what I refused
We tied design work to customer pain metrics, monitored continuously, and not to the volume of screens delivered: A/B and A/B/C tests, CSAT, SUS, NPS, analytics, and watching sales happen.
The same rule held for the future bets. We designed a concept for the full event journey, before, during and after, and tested ideas in the street with guerrilla tests. We split the concept into MVPs and shipped only the first, tokenised tickets, behind a feature flag, and not the whole vision at once. Any event could then choose to issue its tickets on blockchain.
I led the tokenised ticket and six new mobile experiences aimed at payment friction and risk.
What stayed after
The metrics. Satisfaction and brand promotion were measured against the pain they were meant to reduce, and the team that measured them had moved up a full maturity level.