Copilot Money
Setting the quality bar and shipping a powerful new feature
I joined the Copilot Money team in late 2024 at an important crossroads: fresh off an influx of new users from the shutdown of their main competitor, the team needed to orient themselves towards a future of hard work and growth. I was brought in to help set the quality bar for the product, and to help ship a powerful new feature: Goals.
Branding
One of my first tasks was to overhaul the branding and marketing language to meet Copilot Money's ambition; before, the visual presentation of the product used cartoon visuals and generic tone of voice. I engaged Cardinal for a rapid sprint to get the brand ready for a big marketing push during the holiday season.
Design System
From Copilot Money's inception, engineers had been building without a design system. This resulted in slow development, requiring many aspects of the UI to be built and re-built. Inconsistencies were common, and very little documentation existed. I worked with the team to build a design system, including over 30 common components and 50+ new icons across two color themes and two platform variants.
Web
When I joined the team, they were beginning the arduous task of building a web version of the app from the ground up. I hired additional designers and set up a process for rapidly accelerating the work, ensuring the engineers could build a first-class experience without sacrificing consistency or platform conventions.
Goals
Copilot Money's most powerful feature is Goals, which allows users to set up a savings plan for any goal. I worked with the team to design the experience from the ground up, including user research, product definition, and high-fidelity user flows and prototypes.
The Goals feature provided a substantial insight into the "why" behind our users' adoption of features; it gave us clear signals for further personalization. At the same time, it was deeply integraged into the product experience, accessible from nearly every other screen to connect transactions, budgets, and accounts to savings plans.
Goals also had to be "smart" — because Copilot had all of a user's financial context, we could make recommendations for goals, suggest amounts for goals like an emergency fund, and automatically adjust targets based on the user's spending and income.
In my time with Copilot Money, I was able to accelerate crucial feature development, make key hires, build out career development paths and support infrastructure, and make an impact on company culture through establishing operating principles and performance management practices. With my help, the company was well prepared for the next stage of their growth.
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