Finance, a Shockingly Juicy Design Challenge

Working at ad agencies, my goal was to make eye-catching work, whether it was redesigning a renowned pizza tracker, or building large multi-channel campaigns with big budgets and celebrities. At IDEO, I was drawn to design challenges embedded in the fabric of everyday life, from redesigning the voting system of LA for increased accessibility to democracy, envisioning new products and communication strategies for healthier sexual relationships, to realigning the incentive structures of the death industry to expand best practices developed by a small zen hospice.

So when an old coworker asked me about joining Wealthfront, I was surprised at how excited I became by the topic of money. The reason was simple: We all think about money every day.

Money shapes our relationships, our culture, our hopes and our fears. It exclaims itself relentlessly in bold headlines, with ever-new fervors of AI, Fed chairs, gas prices, prediction markets, tariffs, crypto, GameStop, NFTs, etc, etc, etc. And the contradictions in how we engage with our own finances are equally noisy: 

• Earning a higher interest rate on our cash feels good, but inflation? No thanks. 
• Continuing to invest while markets dip is wise, but doing so while watching our account balances drop doesn’t leave us feeling too smart. 
• Paying more in taxes likely means we made more money, but we don't exactly feel like celebrating when our refund is smaller than expected—or non-existent.

While we have plenty of passionate clients that nerd out on our white papers that outline the academically proven ways to save and invest, from efficient frontiers to smart beta, we know most people don’t have the time or energy to engage with finance at that level to become confident as their own financial advisors. Layer in the emotional relationships we have with our money, from how we were raised, where we shop for groceries, to getting married, having pets, or raising kids, and it can all begin to stall us out entirely, keeping us from making any decisions at all, let alone good ones.

Now these are some fantastically wicked problems, ripe for design. 

That’s why I’m still here, nearly a decade in. As the scale and impact of our work grows, so do our challenges. No year is like the last, even as our philosophy remains the same. Wealthfront continues to be a place where I can push on the underlying “whys” of everything we build, breaking down complex financial topics and delivering products that enable successful financial outcomes, while turning down the stress dials that can come along with it.

As a result, we’ve built a creative team that operates as a strategic partner to the company, not a production arm. The creatives we hire are proactive collaborators, who navigate the messy, emotional ambiguity of money while upleveling cross-functional teams. We connect craft to insights, turning good ideas into great ones. We work closely with researchers, marketers, product designers, and engineers to translate early hypotheses into executions, making to think, while developing a deep intuition about those we’re designing for and where they are in their financial journeys.

And that way of working isn’t accidental. It’s a product of how our business is designed.

At Wealthfront, our long-term success is directly tied to that of our clients. Most investing apps and fintechs blur the line between investing and gambling. Their business models are structurally optimized for trading, but it’s harming their clients’ returns. Our investment philosophy, while generating fewer headlines, is academically proven to improve financial outcomes. Unlike many tech companies, our “users” aren’t our product, and since trust is critical to our success, we’re hyper-sensitive to anything that could take advantage of our clients. Over my tenure, I’ve seen these principles reinforced repeatedly, from our designers to executive leadership.

The way your company makes money defines the everyday culture of your workplace, and how you’ll sleep at night. Incentives shape what gets prioritized, what gets rewarded, and ultimately, what gets built. Be honest about the incentives you're working within—how well do you sleep at night?

Me? I’m getting my 8 hours. Because as it turns out, money isn’t just a juicy design problem, and Wealthfront isn’t just an app. Working here has been, and continues to be, a mission to reimagine our relationships to money, and by extension, our outcomes. That means helping everyday people make the most of their hard-earned paychecks, expanding access to financial products that were kept out of reach, and empowering a sense of agency, confidence and security in this beautifully chaotic world we wake up to. That’s what keeps me excited to hit a decade and counting with this team.