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Prosper Case Study

Introduction

When I joined Prosper in mid-2022, the company was taking off. We had launched a near-prime credit card, grown our home equity business, maintained our flagship personal lending product, and continued operating the OG peer-to-peer lending platform (the only one remaining in the US). After 15 years of steady but somewhat tepid growth, Prosper suddenly found itself transformed from a single-product financial service into a leading multi-product fintech.

The Challenge

The rapid expansion highlighted a fundamental problem: Prosper lacked the experience to manage multiple products while keeping brand consistency. Each product team controlled its own look and feel, so the design and branding quickly began to fracture. Our official logo showcased vibrant orange and pink, while our marketing site shifted toward a cooler teal color. Pink buttons would pop up in some places—despite failing WCAG 2.1 standards—simply because the marketing team found they had a higher click-through rate. Meanwhile, the newly launched credit card favored our brand's warmer colors, and our personal and home equity products stuck with teal. The result was a brand identity that felt scattered.

On top of this, Prosper's UX-maturity was still emerging, meaning we lacked a sophisticated process for design and development. Designers used Figma but didn't systematically leverage shared components or advanced features like auto layout, variants, or component properties. Engineering teams faced a similar hurdle: React developers weren't tapping into shared components because they needed resources for short-term solutions. This environment triggered inefficiencies, slowed iteration cycles, and boosted maintenance costs.

Enter Shape

None of this was due to a lack of talent; Prosper's designers and developers just needed the right tools and time to level up. Soon after I arrived, the UX team introduced me to their nascent design system—dubbed Shape—meant to "shape" (literally and figuratively) user experiences across Prosper's product ecosystem.

While everyone understood how crucial a design system could be, the effort to build one from scratch was massive. The team had been working on Shape for a year but never secured executive buy-in, a formal roadmap, or engineering support. Product roadmaps were already jam-packed, and it was tough to demonstrate immediate ROI from building a design system. With no ability to displace other high-priority work, Shape lingered on the fringes.

Resource Constraints

An obvious solution was to expand the design team (then just 5 designers, 2 researchers, and 2 writers supporting multiple complex, high-growth products). But that got shot down, so we had to get creative.

The team was tight-knit and collaborative—huge strengths that remain to this day. Working across Figma, they assembled an inventory of Prosper's design patterns, visual styles, and voice & tone. Based on that audit, they hammered out a quarterly roadmap. They ran it in two-week sprints, parceling out tasks across all five designers and reviewing them at sprint's end.

This approach was spirited but unwieldy:

  • Design-by-committee slowed decisions, with updates needing a majority or unanimous vote.
  • Some designers could dedicate more time than others, creating bottlenecks and uneven momentum.
  • Shape was built in parallel to ongoing feature development—so product teams often released features before the design system was ready, leading to inconsistent designs.

The Two-Track System

To complicate matters, the team pursued two versions of Shape:

  • Shape 1.0: Rooted in existing patterns and styles.
  • Shape 2.0: A future-facing vision that rethought brand and experience from the ground up.

Because this new direction wasn't formally approved, teams picked and chose which track to adopt. This ironically fractured the brand even more, and the design team found themselves maintaining two separate sets of components.

Hitting Pause and Realigning

Clearly, something had to give. I paused development on Shape 1.0 to eliminate duplicate work, especially since it was becoming bloated and looked outdated. Then, I shifted accountability from the entire team to a smaller subset of designers with a knack for component architecture. With this smaller group moving more nimbly, I prepped a business brief to justify hiring a design system specialist.

After roughly six months of leadership discussions, we finally got sign-off to form a dedicated design system squad. This new crew included:

  • 1 UX Manager (leading the squad)
  • 2 Senior UX Designers
  • 1 Mid-level UX Designer

Building a Dedicated Squad

With more resources, product designers were able to lean on the Shape team for integrating existing components or adding new ones that emerged from product workstreams. We also started collaborating heavily with engineering, which had been building its own shared components in React. The real trick was aligning Figma components with React components:

  • They needed identical naming conventions and parallel architecture.
  • Releases had to be coordinated so design and technical components remained in sync.

Around the same time, Figma rolled out major updates (Dev Mode, variables, and VS Code integration), which we embraced wholeheartedly. We also implemented Zeroheight, a design system management platform, to centralize documentation across design and engineering.

Defining Our Users

We quickly realized Shape was more than a "design tool." The squad identified two user groups:

Primary Users:

  • UX Designers relying on reusable components and guidelines.
  • Engineers wanting code-ready components with clear specs.
  • Product Managers leveraging Shape to guide requirements and speed up delivery.

Secondary Users:

  • Executives, referencing Shape for high-level brand alignment.
  • Marketing/Operations teams maintaining brand consistency across communications and materials.

Crafting a Vision and Strategy

With a better understanding of our users, the squad defined a guiding vision for Shape (e.g., "Shape unifies our brand, streamlines collaboration, and supports rapid, high-quality product development."). For every decision, we asked, "Will this help us achieve our vision?"

We established progress metrics to track forward momentum. These metrics informed our high-level strategy, which spelled out the next 12 months, and we created a tactical rollout plan. Items most directly tied to revenue or existing critical workstreams were top priority.

Results

With all this in place, Shape evolved from a sluggish side project into a core Prosper asset. Assigning clear ownership meant each team member tackled specific tasks while the UX manager oversaw total progress. The team used a test-and-learn approach for new design patterns, iterating rapidly before enshrining anything in Shape.

We're now seeing:

  • 30% increase in engineering velocity
  • 40% boost in design team capacity

We estimate these efficiencies drive around $300,000 per month in cost savings and $50,000 per month in additional revenue.

Key Lessons Learned

Gaining Buy-In

Getting alignment wasn't just about executive sponsorship; we also needed our own product designers on board. People feared losing creative control or having to fix what wasn't "broken" in their own UIs. But without widespread adoption, the system wouldn't deliver its biggest value.

Engineering Collaboration

Engineering was also resource-constrained, so we had to show why a unified system was worth the short-term pain. Timing these changes alongside other revenue-driven workstreams helped.

Figma's Limitations

We experienced the unexpected: Figma's newer features weren't always stable. Its versioning was buggy, and moving components between libraries sometimes disconnected everything. We spent countless hours troubleshooting. Figma support was also slow to respond. We learned to keep local backups and avoid a "move fast, break things" philosophy when a single slip-up could vaporize months of progress.

Conclusion

These lessons continue to shape our approach. The new design system squad has made remarkable progress, but there's still a journey ahead. Shape is now integrated into Prosper's product workflows, but we'll keep refining, collaborating, and innovating to ensure it remains a catalyst for excellence across Prosper's entire product suite.