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Cesar Torres

+1 (210) 912-6439
[email protected]

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Howdy! 👋

My name is Cesar (like the emperor) and I'm a design leader living in New York City.

What is this? 🧐

I hate scrambling if there's bad wi-fi, so you may find this wrap-up helpful info if you need a handy link or some quick info about me. I look forward to meeting!
—C

Conversation starters 🤝

Sketches and diagrams for documenting layout and flows

MVP → MLP

A "buy now, pay later" (BNPL) card experience sought to address the specific financial rhythms of this demographic: large upfront inventory purchases and cyclical yearly economic patterns. In addition to the core Brex card and dashboard product experience, the product would allow Individual purchases to be paid back in three installments due 30/60/90 days from the initial transaction.As 2022 kicked off, the team sought to quickly stand up a workable first version of the product in support of the months long manual pilot. The Studiohouse contract scope comprised of delivery of a minimum lovable product (MLP) to be completed over a six-week product design sprint.

I dove right in and evaluated the existing product experience and design system for a baseline from which to build from. One key design principle I called out to the team early on was to make sure we were addressing the specific demographic’s needs but weren’t creating too far of a deviation from the core Brex product experience, thereby impacting areas like the main codebase, design system, and Support knowledge and documentation.I reviewed the requirements that my Product partner had put together in advance of the studio coming on board. He also shared with me a roundup of customer calls he had used to inform his requirements. After feedback rounds and PRD edits, we finalized the cut line for the MLP.

🙶 I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to work with Cesar as my design partner… All-in, acquiring Studiohouse and bringing Cesar aboard was one of Brex's strongest people decisions, and I'm excited to see Cesar grow into a design leader at Brex. 🙷
–New Verticals PM lead

Component and layout explorations

One particular challenge included clearly depicting the summary of upcoming payments — at its most complicated, a Brex admin could see as many as 30 upcoming daily payments. As such, I paid particular focus to the Overview and Payments summary cards, as they presented opportunities to visualize critical information for managing this novel card experience at-a-glance.Because this particular demographic was concerned with making the most of their credit limit, I recommended we invert the card balance visualization from depicting Balance to leading with Available spend instead.

Acquisition & Full time

Designs were presented and approved to Brex design leadership and handed off to the team’s eng lead for implementation. With the MLP complete, the six-week engagement was a success. We began acquisition talks and Studiohouse officially joined Brex.

MLP → GTM

When I came onto the New Verticals team full-time starting in March 2022, I was able to:

XFN workshops to inform roadmap planning

With the launch scheduled for July 2022, the product team and I put the finishing touches on the v1.0 product experience. Product and I also kicked off GTM efforts with product marketing and provide feedback on email and website launch materials (left).

Strategy shift & Shutdown

While the team drove towards launch, revenue and product strategies shifted to mid-market/enterprise segments and the organization restructured accordingly. Brex announced an across the board shutdown of all small business segment accounts.After many discussions with leadership if e-commerce would be affected, the BNPL product was shelved one month before the scheduled launch date and the team functions distributed to support the upmarket focus.

🙶 Back in April [2022] we launched Empower, and we decided to put the full weight of Brex towards building the best global payments platform for tech startups and larger companies … but we believe small businesses deserve a partner that is entirely focused on them. 🙷
–Pedro, Brex co-CEO

Productizing & Automating

In Q2 2023, our team collaborated with other xfn product teams to support the new company strategy by automating the credit and underwriting requirements for larger customers. The temporary manual processes we had in place were cumbersome for Sales, UW Ops, and Support, hindering our ability to scale quickly.For this significant product update, we collectively decided to sequence updating the Onboarding [M1] phase (credit application and product onboarding) phase with an updated application variant before moving on to the Ongoing [M2] phase (post-approval).

Diagrams I created for documenting the current/ideal states of the underwriting process

Selections from the finalized updates to the Enterprise Onboarding flow

For our specific section of the updated flow, I set up standing xfn discussions to keep operational teams actively involved in the design process and ensure consistent and proactive buy-in. My team leads and I worked closely to determine their requirements, keeping them involved in technical and design tradeoffs.By including them closely, we were able to recommend more efficient ways to capture necessary data, and even if we were changing their SOPs, they were well informed of those changes. We were also able to include affordances that preempted customer behavior they'd witnessed while managing the process manually.

Underwriting 101

In my conversations with people outside of the teams directly involved in my group’s product development, I realized that most only had a very cursory understanding of our underwriting approach at Brex. In these "external" alignment efforts, I made sure to orient our group’s work with “Underwriting 101” — distilling our complex and evolving credit policies into simple visuals and frameworks.This opportunity to "evangelize" the importance of credit and UW at Brex would continue on later in my role as group design lead.

🙶 …thanks for that extra context on UW. Admittedly, I didn't really know too much about it beyond the more straightforward way it worked for Startups.😬 🙷
–Brex design director

Updates to the Onboarding application could now better set — and exceed! — enterprise customer expectations

Launching Onboarding [M1]

After securing alignment from Design staff, I proceeded to hand off the onboarding changes to the project devs. When the adjacent product teams were ready with their changes, we updated the flow for a small cohort and kept a close eye on the results.The updates performed well and we were able to slowly roll out updates to all customers:
✶ Post launch, the updated Onboarding product experience reduced the total onboarding application time to approval from up to 12 days to an average of 3 business days.

M1 → M2

With the xfn M1 complete, our team quickly shifted our sights to a more internally-focused M2: implementing net new functionality for supporting the Ongoing underwriting needs of existing (or recently approved) mid-market and enterprise customers.I proposed we develop a surface I inherited when joining the team. Rather than the UW Ops team relying on queries for customer lists, manual outreach, and third-party document collection, a customer could be notified and manage their document needs in-product.

Seeking problem alignment on the way forward with an Ongoing underwriting solution

Our team continued with the inclusive design process we had conducted before, now bringing in even more operational stakeholders, namely the Credit policy team and portions of the Sales team.We aligned with stakeholders on the ideal experience, considering technical and operational tradeoffs and handoffs between various operational teams.

In-product Ongoing underwriting experience

Clear and actionable in-product comms across components

In-product comms

With ongoing document requests moving in-product, we could now communicate updates more granularly.

Since a submission could include some incorrect or rejected documents, working with a content designer was critical — even in the most complex states (above), we aimed to make a customer's submission make sense.

Launching Ongoing [M2]

After securing alignment across the board, I handed off the changes to engineering and provided implementation support. We released the product for a small cohort of customers with upcoming Ongoing requests.The updates performed well and we were able to slowly roll out updates to all customers:
✶ In the two months following the initial rollout, about 60% of customers successfully submitted their financial documents with no follow up or manual intervention needed. We also saved UW Ops at least 4 days of work for customer outreach and hours and hours of document review and validation.Importantly, now our high value customers now had a dedicated surface in the product to upload their financial documents and actively manage their credit limit.

Creating the ideal in-product Ongoing experience

Lacking a dedicated research function, I wrote, sought feedback on, and finalized a research plan and interview script. I also coordinated and held over 15 customer interviews to gather qualitative research. I focused the conversations around underwriting requirements, credit limit education, and the onboarding and ongoing limit management processes of mid-market and enterprise "limit managers" — a profile I created for the purposes of the study.

Insights, themes, and areas of opportunity

Outcomes

I summarized the findings into three categories of Outcomes: eight insights that challenged our existing product knowledge or assumptions and six themes that I applied to four major areas of opportunity.We used the themes and opportunities for planning and to structure the Limit Experience team’s roadmap moving forward.

The culmination of this work resulted in a more comprehensive view of the customer credit limit journey for upmarket customers. It also helped our team engage with and more formally incorporate our xfn operational teams into our product development process.In my research's conclusion, I was also able to conceptualize a metaphor for our team and the rest of the company to illustrate how limits fit into our latest product strategy (below).

A more detailed customer journey — now including xfn partners — with related themes

Strategizing OKR impact

I worked with my group's Product partner to determine if changes to the customer credit limit experience that I oversaw could contribute to the OKR. We realized that our underdeveloped early payments feature (which had been largely untouched since launching in Q4 2022) could be a useful tool to prevent customer credit limit drops.Enabling the feature let customers configure a trigger for automatic one-time payments once they crossed a preset utilization amount — e.g. a customer's balance was paid in full from a preselected bank account when a customer passed 75% of their credit limit.

Our experiment would target customers who routinely hit or exceeded their full credit limit

Although configuring early payments would proactively automate payments for all customers who enabled it, we narrowed our focus to high utilization customers — that is, customers who continually maxed out their monthly credit limit.An initial analysis found that only about 6% of high utilization customers had this feature enabled. Our analysis also concluded that over 80% of customers did not experience a negative change in their credit limit drop after they enrolled in early payments.

Designing the experiment

When H2 began, we brainstormed specific growth tactics with a small EPD cohort (which included an engineer and eng manager and a content designer I led). We hypothesized that if a high utilization customer was continually making manual, one-time payments, they were the best suited for enabling the early payments feature. And that the one-time payments flow itself would be the best to "advertise" the helpful feature.

The existing one-time payment takeover

The experiment added an "early payments" upsell modal to encourage enabling the feature

Launching the experiment

I presented my designs to the team, iterated, and eng built and launched the experiment. Week over week, we reviewed our metrics and revised quickly on the design+eng fronts. And since design and eng was already in there "kicking up dust," we even took the opportunity to improve some low hanging fruit for broader-reaching improvement on the stale feature.✶ Over our six week experiment period we increased early payment feature adoption by over 1,500 accounts.This was a great outcome for the customer credit experience and GMV.

As we got more customer eyes and feedback on early payments in general (and more internal eyes as our experiments performed well), we even laid out two additional milestones in the feature backlog to significantly improve on the general feature experience into 2024

Planned milestones for early payments, including email and UX refinements

A snappy brand

We began with a branding exercise, which I led. We eventually landed on a playful visual concept reminiscent of colorful cut paper, which would play nicely with the parent Snapchat brand (right).The team had trouble deciding between a couple of names for the platform, but I urged them to go with "Snap Kit" as I could foresee the creative potential over a more technical name.The product lead had an illustrator in mind, who we hired. I creative directed him in the "crafty" and "playful" visual style for the pieces we would need. I set the color and iconography of the first four core integrations the team had ready (with two others planned) and called each of these "kits": Creative, Login, Bitmoji, and Story Kit (eventually, Ad and Camera Kit would be added to the assortment in follow up releases).

Snap Kit brand exercise

More snappy bits

Going along with the "crafty" brand concept and the individual kit iconography, I recalled art supplies I had used in the past and shared the reference with the illustrator. Using the shapes from the kit icons, we came up with the Snap Kit "helix."

A "Helix" stencil

Snap Kit wordmark in Avenir Pro

So as to not deviate too far from the existing Snapchat brand, we kept the type similar to what was used already in the Snapchat brand guidelines and in the mobile app.

Marketing site

We used the naming concept and visual direction to begin working on wireframes for the marketing site. Since the platform was fairly rudimentary to start, we settled on a single page to communicate all of the features.

Website visual preparation

Understanding Snap Kit

Although developers would be the core audience for the site, we urged the Snap Kit team to also consider non-technical decision makers as their audience.Since anyone visiting the site might not be so familiar with the nuances of Snapchat, we made sure we fully understood the core mobile product and the ins-and-outs of the possibilities of Snap Kit.We proposed inserting single-serving app examples (color coded of course) on the site so visitors could quickly see the benefits of each kit. We designed multiple app concepts and worked with a motion designer to animate each one.

I wrote most of the content on the site as directional placeholders, but after review by Snap's content and legal teams, most of it stayed in place (I was just happy that my favorite line for Story Kit stayed in: "We built stories so you don't have to.") 🎉

One of the Creative Kit sample apps

Snap Kit 1.0

With all of our assets in place and concepts for the site approved, we handed off the site to a small team of developers we hired. We delivered the site to the Snap Kit team, right on time for their announcement at the inaugural Snap Partner Summit.✶ That year, the Snap Kit website helped secure over 200 integrations with partners like Fitbit, Netflix, Tinder, Venmo, and VSCO.The Snap Kit team reached back out when preparing for a v1.5 release, for which we made various site updates.

Snap Kit 2.0

When the team was readying for their next major 2.0 release, we were able to evolve the original brand elements and website visual language to be more in line with updated Snapchat brand guidelines.✶ After the launch at the following year's Snap Partner Summit, the Snap Kit 2.0 website enabled the platform to secure more than 800 partner integrations.

Snap for Business

With multiple successful releases with the Snap Kit team, the Snap for Business team reached out for another web design project.The company had been struggling with siloed-off teams building too many variants of web design visual languages. We agreed with the Snap creative director's request and set one core principle of this project was to attempt to create a baseline for a visual design language that the other web properties could move towards, unified under a "Snap Inc." banner.We designed the advertising site and handed off the materials for the Snapchat web developer team to implement.

Snap for Business 2.0

Snap for Business 2.0

After the team found success with our original redesign, they updated the product set they offered to advertisers. They reached back out and we helped them with a content update for the Snap for Business site, adding a product explanation page and a partner showcase.

CitizenSnap

Another corporate team we collaborated with was CitizenSnap, the corporate governance team. We designed a website for them with the Snap 1.0 design system.Additionally, I creative directed an illustrator we hired to design the team's iconography. Based off of the new brand guidelines' "ghost frame" concept, I led the non-design governance team through the iterations to materialize their four principles: Society, Planet, People, and Governance.These visual icons live on at the (now redesigned) CitizenSnap website.

CitizenSnap "ghost frames"

Working with a brand designer, we landed on a logo comprised of an illustrative icon dubbed "The Portal".The wordmark included modern type that anchored the company and its products in the presentfuture.

WorkOS brand identity

WorkOS brand guidelines

Other brand elements, like secondary type and colors referenced the vintage look and feel of the original mid-century inspiration points. I even came across inspiration for colors in-person at The Guggenheim.

More color inspiration from Hilma af Klint's The Parsifal Series (1916)

Additional touchpoints

To showcase the viability of the brand identity, we provided speculative brand treatments like business cards and posters (a callback to our IBM inspirations).Additionally, given my background with startups and fundraising and M&A conversations, I provided a scalable template for use during seed funding conversations with VCs.

WorkOS brand treatments

Current WorkOS branding

Foundations

Although the WorkOS company and product has evolved years later, the design team has maintained the original foundations of the brand identity we delivered.

Maven 2.0 visual design/layout explorations

I worked closely with the PM out of Detroit to conduct site visits for the residential carsharing facilities and led the charge with him on determining how we could ensure the product experience could seamlessly serve the needs for both residential and public carsharing.I diagramed the experience through multiple iterations (left) and began to wireframe the end-to-end screens we would need to design.

Once we landed on a suitable solution (cleverly using the signup promo code field during registration to fork an onboarding variant for residential carsharing), I began to explore visual designs for the mobile app experience.Since GM was providing the inventory of cars, I was able to showcase the high resolution vehicle imagery in the app experience.

Maven 2.0 flow diagrams and interaction design prototypes

Previous Maven brand and app

Identity refresh

Since the pilot had been running for a couple of years, GM had been using a brand identity that was quickly commissioned at the start of the pilot (without much investment into the outcome).While I was redesigning the app, I led the communication designer I had originally hired for Sidecar through a brand identity exercise. We kept the yellow, but ensured it was easier to use and see on a mobile screen, and notably updated the type to a more modern (urban) and human type.

I finished out the visual design for the end-to-end experience, including multiple onboarding and registration flows, a full reservation flow, and car controls (right).The design team began to use the updated type, colors, and app components in their various feature updates, creating the initial design system. Additionally, custom iconography from the brand exercise was incorporated into the design system.

Some key screens from the Maven 2.0 mobile app

Scalable design

As internal council for other GM “urban mobility” programs (including the Cruise/Lyft autonomous vehicle joint venture), I was also able to consult with the New York based team of BOOK by Cadillac, a luxury carsharing service.This included ensuring Maven's design system could be repurposed for any similar reservation functionality (right).

Scaling the Maven design system to BOOK by Cadillac