Unified Lending Platform
I joined Lenders Cooperative as a contractor and grew into a permanent role soon after. It's part of Summit Technology Group, alongside its sibling brand Allocore, and the product at its core is a lending origination and servicing platform serving both government and commercial markets.
When I arrived, there wasn't a design system yet. That's where I started.
Why the design system mattered
A lending platform is a deceptively complex product. Government programs and commercial workflows each carry their own forms, branching logic, and compliance shapes. Multiple teams — product, engineering, marketing, sales — all needed mockups, fast, and they all needed to look like one product when they landed.
Without a system, a small team could not have kept up. Building one was the single highest-leverage thing I could do in the first stretch.
The design system became the connective tissue. It picked up the mockup backlog, standardized the look across teams, and gave us room to think about the harder UX problems instead of redrawing the same input field for the third time this week.
A full design shop, briefly
For a stretch I was effectively the in-house design shop. Product mockups, marketing assets, sales-deck support — anything that needed to look right and ship fast came through. The design system made that workload survivable; even sales decks borrowed from the same tokens and components, so the brand stayed consistent without me touching every file.
Moving closer to engineering
As the work shifted toward the commercial product — the Lenders Cooperative side — I moved closer to the engineering team. The design system was helping the design half move fast, but engineering was still rebuilding components from scratch every time. The natural next step was a real component library, with design and engineering on the same source of truth.
I built the core of that library together with the team. From that point forward, replacing legacy screens with the new system was a genuine refactor, not a rewrite. Whole sections of the product modernized in weeks rather than quarters, and the user experience took a step change every time another surface got swapped over.
Two projects worth calling out
A new data table. Built from the ground up, with filters, saved custom views, column resizing, and per-user display settings. The data table is a thing borrowers, loan officers, and admins all live inside, so the impact of this one component spread further than any other.
The borrower portal. A multi-quarter effort to take the borrower experience from a digitized-paper application — long, intimidating, abandoned mid-flow — to a focused, task-based portal. Conversion went up across every bank and credit union running on the platform.
What it added up to
A design system, then a component library, then specific components and flows that touched the parts of the product real users feel. Done in that order, on a small team, alongside everything else. The lesson I keep coming back to: foundations let small teams ship like big ones.