Interview with Rodolfo Ferro Casagrande from Helcim

1. While growing in your role as a product designer at Helcim to the Design Director, you occupied a rare front seat to the change in design function requirements as both the organization and its product matured. How has your definition of a “good design” altered in view of product design morphing into a systems-thinking practice? And what do you believe remains non-negotiable throughout these shifts?

When I started, Helcim was a twenty-person company, and I was a solo designer. Because of our size, we had this opportunity to be extremely lean in how we operated. Since I was the only one doing both front-end code and UX design, I could think through a problem, design it, and code it, all in the span of a couple of days.

One of the challenges of scaling, though, not just as a company but as a function, is that you have to start letting go of that level of “just be practical” and trade some of it off for process and delegation. I remember hiring our first designers and having to build business cases for why we couldn’t just jump straight to a solution, why we needed to spend time on discovery first. As we grew and started hiring more designers and product managers, that validation became the norm, and it let us build with more purpose, I’d say.

Similarly, with the team growing and complexity scaling, we also understood the need to build systems around the way we worked, so we could “talk the same language.” For design, that was the transition from custom code to our first design system, a tool that would build tools, creating a consistency and coherency that wouldn’t have been possible with more people and more moving pieces.

As the company scaled, so did the complexity, and that complexity needed to be managed. I believe that acted as a forcing function allowing my definition of “good” to grow over time. Both of those shifts, discovery and systems, came from the same place: I wanted us to become a bit more critical of what we shipped, since when you grow as a company, you also want to raise the bar for what you build.

On the other hand, a non-negotiable for me has always been pushing for a level of quality beyond what we could naturally execute at our given stage of growth. I think that’s a good way to ensure the bar keeps moving up over time.

That said, with too much process, you become too slow, and lose the practicality that lets you actually get things done. I believe that no matter how large you get, you always need to find that middle ground, enough process to build confidence in what you’re building, but enough practicality to keep momentum and ship fast. And honestly, I think with AI now, we all have the chance to go back to some of that practical way of working while still having the necessary confidence in place, as barriers to execution are gradually dissolving.

2. There’s echoing customer feedback that brand attributes don’t match the final experience. This is especially imperative across the payments landscape where merchants must experience the transparency, affordability, and human-ness that messaging often promises. What are some of the persisting obstacles you’ve found in transmuting brand attributes into product decisions?

This is a very topical question, because we just announced our brand evolution, which is focused on the notion that we “don’t play games.” Not only do we say we’re transparent, honest, and clear with our service, but we show the math that supports what we’re saying. So our new positioning goes back to what Helcim really stands for, our defining values, and builds the communication around those in a more assertive, provocative way, to let merchants know loud and clear that while we play by those values, the industry doesn’t. Even though other companies might say it in their advertisements, that’s not usually backed up by evidence. We not only want to communicate that we don’t play those games, we also want to educate, so businesses are aware of the shady practices other payments companies usually employ.

Now, this communication has to be true in our product just as much as in our brand attributes. And I’d say one of the challenges of translating those brand values into product decisions is constantly choosing the harder path when building our product ecosystem. For example, while other payment companies can rely on third-party services to manage fraud, reconciliation, and billing, we deliberately decided to build the entire payments stack in-house to keep our rates low, and at the same time minimize our margin to maximize the value we bring to our merchants. Value that pays back at scale. That’s probably the best explanation of what “the harder path” means when you’re building a business for the long term.

3. Even the slightest ambiguity or hitch around payouts and declined payments can make business leaders lose confidence in your product. The design team also carries the burden of building that trust- as do marketing and sales. What would be your primary step to design moments where end users feel informed as well as in control, as opposed to merely reassured?

Building trust is a big challenge of modern fintech. Customers don’t build trust in your product because of your advertising and sharp headlines, they build it through their experience using the product. We can say we’re trustworthy, but that won’t be true just because we say it, it’ll be true because of how we shape our product experience.

One design philosophy we lean on is over-communicating when things go wrong (e.g., a declined transaction). That means bringing clarity by deciding what to show and what to hide in the UI, using the right tone of voice based on the context, and writing short, concise copy that addresses the problem, the “why,” and the next step.

That is just a small example of how you can take a more proactive approach in those circumstances to reassure the user that everything is under control. When you do that consistently across your product ecosystem, your users will start building enough confidence to trust your product even when things don’t go as expected.

4. Payment platforms are often differentiated around transparent pricing, no monthly fees, and volume discounts- but often the marketing terminology can get difficult to interpret. In your opinion, what is design’s part in simplifying complex financial lingo while not erasing the nuance?

The best example of this challenge is explaining our pricing model, Interchange Plus. By its nature it’s far more transparent than flat rate, since you can clearly see what our margin, interchange rate, and card fees are, but it’s also much harder to explain. Flat rate is the opposite: more opaque, but much easier to understand.

Design plays a critical role here. Since I joined Helcim, I’ve gone through numerous iterations of our pricing page and different creative approaches to explaining Interchange Plus in a simpler, more straightforward way. And over the years, doing this continuous reimagining, I’ve noticed a pattern: understanding where the noise ends and the signal starts, and trying to remove everything that isn’t signal. What that looked like in practice is us saying less over time, through both design and copy, not to make the message vaguer for the sake of being simpler, but to identify the remaining areas of noise and strip them out, so the signal gets stronger and stronger, and at that point, even simpler to understand.

5. When an invoice goes unpaid, or a merchant can’t manage a dispute- anything outside what’s planned- is when the underlying design structure is questioned. Which design principles guide Helcim’s approach to communicating failure, uncertainty, and the next steps?

As I mentioned before, a good approach is over-communicating, and by doing so, being proactive, especially when things go outside the happy path. I’d say the response depends on the severity of the scenario; for example: an unpaid invoice is a milder occurrence than a merchant not being able to manage a dispute. So on top of over-communication, we definitely need to personalize the response, so the design feels tailored to that particular event.

This, if you will, goes a little against the concept of a design system, since it focuses on specificity rather than reusability. You don’t want to create a one-size-fits-all response, you want to personalize it to the occurrence. So sometimes you need to go against a design system pattern for the sake of the user, and address the problem with more specific context. And by the way, this is another example of how your user can build trust with your product.

6. The handoff from self-service software to support is often a critical brand moment for small businesses, especially where money is at stake. What should a practical and potent relationship between product design and human support look like in a growing fintech domain?

I believe that the better we do our job as designers at explaining events, flows, unhappy paths, and outcomes, the fewer support calls we’ll get. That said, not all products are self-explanatory given their complexity and nuance, so we can’t say it’s a binary correlation. There’s a spectrum that defines usability and clarity, and we’ve moved, and continue to move, toward making our experiences more intuitive and clear.

AI can play a critical role in helping us move further along that spectrum. Earlier, I talked about the value of specificity, tailoring the response to the exact scenario rather than a one-size-fits-all pattern. In the past, that kind of specificity could really only come from a human support rep who could listen to your particular issue and respond accordingly. Now, AI gives us the chance to bring that same specificity directly into the product itself, letting the UX adapt and respond to a user’s specific situation in the moment, rather than requiring them to escalate to a person to get that tailored answer.

7. Leading brand and product design demands aligning different disciplines such as product design, visuals, research, content, engineering, product management, support, security, and compliance, around shared customer outcomes. When have you noticed the most tension while working on both product and brand design? What’s your suggestion for leaders to reinforce a culture where the two elements reinforce each other?

I wouldn’t call it tension, I’d call it perspective. Each department is trying to achieve the same goal, but through a different lens. We all want to build a great company that stands for its values and ships a phenomenal product experience. How we get there can differ depending on your point of view. I think that’s true for Helcim as much as it is for any other company.

As leaders, we all bring unique perspectives on how to achieve our goals. When those perspectives clash or differ, I try to focus on where they overlap, and build strong collaboration right there. To give a more tangible example: across product, design, and marketing, we all do research. That research brings unique value because it comes from different functions, but it can also create friction for that exact same reason. The art is in combining everything, so the result is greater than the sum of its parts, so every unique perspective is considered, and the strongest alignment happens in those overlapping areas.

My suggestion for leaders, in the context of a shared goal, is that adjacent functions will always enrich your own and make the outcome stronger. So instead of becoming territorial about the area you operate in, leaders should engage with every other area, and in doing so, break down the silos. That’s what it means to operate as a “first team.”