Lenders Cooperative

When I joined Lenders Cooperative, there was no design system. Product, engineering, marketing, and sales all needed mockups fast, and they all needed to look like one product when they landed.

Lenders Cooperative, part of Summit Technology Group, runs a loan origination and servicing platform for government programs and commercial lending. My work spanned the design system, component library, AI prototyping platform, shared data table, and borrower portal as our small team modernized the platform.

The borrower portal

The existing borrower experience followed the shape of a paper application. It was long, intimidating, and people abandoned it partway through. The redesign organized the application into tasks for the borrower to complete.

That change meant working on how the application was structured as well as how its screens looked. Government and commercial lending bring different forms and branching requirements. A consistent set of fields helped with the interface, but we still had to work through the flow itself.

The design problem was to keep those requirements intact while giving each task a clear purpose. The relevant information and next step needed to be easy to find.

The portal took multiple quarters. It was part of a broader modernization that also included the design system and component library, built alongside the team's other product work.

Getting design and engineering to share the components

We started with the design system because the same basic work kept turning up in the mockup backlog. Redrawing an input field for the third time that week left less time for the lending workflow around it.

The system covered product mockups, marketing assets, and sales-deck support. Shared tokens kept those materials consistent while several teams were asking for different things at once.

Engineering was still rebuilding the components when those designs reached implementation. We followed the design system with a component library, so new screens could use the same implemented fields, tables, and controls. That gave us a way to replace sections of the legacy interface incrementally.

That sequence mattered for a small team. The design system addressed repeated design work; the component library made those decisions available to engineering. We could update individual screens while continuing the rest of the product work.

Prototyping with AI and our own components

I embraced AI as a way to make our ideas easier to build and test. I built our own prototyping platform around the component library we'd created, so we could work with agents to quickly develop fully clickable prototypes in the browser.

Using the same components kept those prototypes consistent with the design system. We could deploy them as demos and share a link for internal feedback or customer usability testing, giving people a working flow to explore and respond to.

A table used across the product

One of the larger components was a new data table, built from the ground up. It included filters, saved custom views, column resizing, and per-user display settings. Borrowers, loan officers, and administrators all used it.

Those settings let people keep a view suited to their work. Putting them in the shared table meant the same component could support different needs across the product. Changes to that component could then reach every screen that used it.