CONTEXT
Mint
A leading personal finance app that helped customers track spending, create budgets, and monitor net worth by connecting their financial accounts into one experience.
CASE STUDY
Mint
IMPACT
40% growth in monthly active users in under four months
WHY IT MATTERED
Critical to establishing a year-round consumer financial ecosystem beyond tax season
MY ROLE
Led the end-to-end product transformation across multiple teams, shaping strategy, team structure, and execution
TIMELINE
2021–2022
ECOSYSTEM OPPORTUNITY
TurboTax needed a way
to extend customer
relationships beyond
tax season.
TurboTax built the relationship.
Mint had the opportunity to
make it last all year.
BUSINESS PRESSURE
Business Pressure
EXISTING SIGNALS
17 → 14
monthly visits declining
4.8 → 4.5
app store ratings slipping
MAU
growth had plateaued
BUSINESS EXPECTATIONS
40M+
TurboTax ecosystem reach
38% growth
month-one retention target
10% increase
overall retention rate
CUSTOMERS
Customers
For Trackers
Used Mint to monitor spending, balances, and transactions across their financial accounts.
For Goal Seekers
Came to Mint during moments of financial change to budget better, reduce debt, save money, and regain financial control.
Mint product screens
THE MISSION
Transform Mint beyond tracking to help people make financial progress.
Behavioral Tension
BEHAVIORAL TENSION
GOAL SEEKERS
PRODUCT IMPLICATIONS
Frame their intent as goals
Redesign onboarding around customer intent and financial goals.
Overview is overwhelming
Simplify experience around the customer's most critical JTBD
Customers expected guidance
Shift from retrospective tracking toward guided financial progress.
TRACKERS
Account connectivity created friction
Improve connection reliability and restore trust in Mint's “all-in-one” promise.
Ads reduced trust
Reduce ad density and prioritize core financial tasks.
Product quality degraded
Modernize the core experience around speed, clarity, and utility.
DIAGNOSIS
Customers were using Mint for confidence at a glance.
Quickly scanning balances, credit score, alerts, and transactions to determine if anything needed attention.
30%
scanned overview and ended their session.
45%
Entered transactions through account-level balances.
28%
Checked alerts before transactions or account details.
THE BRIEF
How do we simplify Mint around the highest value behaviors while protecting exiting retention and engagement?
CONSTRAINTS
Tracker first
Preserve the speed and confidence customers already returned for.
80/20 approach
Bring 80% of high-frequency engagement into the overview with one-tap access.
CORE SYSTEMS
Onboarding
Goal-based + fast value
Overview
Simplified + daily progress
Notifications + Insights
Bring customers back
PRIORITIZED JTBD
Accounts
Transactions
Credit Score
Alerts
Financial Progress*
FINANCIAL CLARITY FRAMEWORK
Answering
customers' most
important financial
questions.
Every feature and data visualization was designed to answer one of these questions as quickly and clearly as possible.
TEAM STRUCTURE
Team Structure
Foundation
PODS
Accounts
Transactions
Budgets
Spending
Goals
PODS
Debt
Savings
Notifs & Insights
PODS
Push
Alerts
Marketplace
PODS
Credit cards
Personal loans
Investments
Savings
Mint Live
PODS
Financial Advice
Scheduling
Subscription
TEAM STRUCTURE
Orchestration
Aligned six organizations and multiple shared platforms to deliver one customer strategy.
Cross-functional
GM
VP Product
VP Engineering
VP Marketing
Design Dir.
Data Dir.
Design
Design Director
Design Mgr.
Foundation
Foundation
Foundation
Notifications
Marketplace
Goals
Live
Marketing
Researcher
Content
Content
Platform partners
IDS (Design System)
IDX (Data Exchange)
Identity
TurboTax
DESIGN LED TRACKS
Design Led Tracks
Overview
Simplify the experience.
Reduce friction around the highest value customer behaviors.
Data visualization
Make progress visible.
Visualize momentum and financial progress at a glance.
Visual System
Restore delight and trust.
Modernize Mint with clarity, hierarchy, and craft.
OPERATIONALIZING THE TRANSFORMATION
Operationalizing the Transformation
Aligned product and engineering leadership around critical delivery milestones
Secured platform alignment, resourcing, and roadmap prioritization across shared systems
Led cross-functional working sessions to shape shared product direction
PRODUCT EXPERIENCE STRATEGY
Product Experience Strategy
EXPERIENCE ARCHITECTURE
Experience Architecture
Top Tabs
Separate Tab
Hero drawer
Evaluated through iterative qualitative testing and engineering feasibility reviews.
FINAL EXPERIENCE SYSTEM
Final Experience System
personalized, focused and joyful
SEQUENCING CORE SYSTEM BETS
Better outcomes came
from smarter tradeoffs,
not bigger scope
We modernized the highest-impact customer journeys first, balancing redesign with targeted updates to existing experiences.
Making the familiar feel new, and the new feel familiar.
GOOD
BETTER
BEST
OVERVIEW
OVERVIEW
OVERVIEW
FROM
overwhelming + generic
TO
focused + personalized
ONBOARDING
ONBOARDING
ONBOARDING
FROM
transactional + work
TO
contextual + joyful
NOTIFICATIONS & INSIGHTS
NOTIFICATIONS & INSIGHTS
NOTIFICATIONS & INSIGHTS
FROM
generic + forgettable
TO
data-backed + persuasive
IMPACT
Impact
11%
first-month
retention
40%
growth monthly
active users
3 pts
PRS
increase
4.8
app store
rating