Unifying the mortgage journey across nine products at Lower
Lower is a mortgage company where a single borrower can move through multiple products, teams, and systems before their loan funds. My work focused on making that journey feel less fragmented — for borrowers, loan officers, marketers, product teams, and engineers.
As Principal Product Designer, I led end-to-end design across customer-facing experiences, internal tools, brand systems, marketing workflows, and product foundations. The work was not just about shipping screens. It was about creating the shared patterns, decision-making structure, and design system Lower needed to move as one product ecosystem.
Company
Lower Mortgage
Date
December 2024-Present
My Role
Principal Product Designer
Overview
When I joined Lower, product experiences were being designed and shipped across separate teams, products, and business units. Each surface had its own local needs, but the mortgage journey depended on all of them working together.
The core challenge was consistency without slowing teams down. Borrowers needed a clearer, more connected path through the mortgage process.
Loan officers needed tools that made the borrower feel known, not re-questioned.
Product and engineering teams needed reusable patterns they could trust across a regulated, high-complexity workflow.
My role was to connect those pieces into a more cohesive system.
At a Glance
Strategic Focus:
Turn disconnected product asks into a shared ecosystem strategy supported by reusable patterns, conditional flow logic, documentation, and design system architecture.
Challenge:
Lower’s mortgage journey spanned multiple products, teams, and handoffs, creating fragmented experiences for borrowers, loan officers, and internal teams.
Impact:
Launched a 0–1 Loan Officer Guided Experience
Unified design foundations across nine products
Supported a 1:20 design-to-engineering ratio
Led cross-system documentation that raised the bar for how design, product, engineering, brand, and marketing collaborate
The end-to-end workflow at Lower
User Journey
Movoto → Lower.com → Lightspeed → Jumpstart → Loan Officer Guided Experience (LowerOS) → LowerOS LOS → Encompass
Across this journey, I had to balance two major tensions:
First, borrower experience and loan officer experience could not be treated separately. Any friction removed from the borrower had to make the loan officer’s work easier, not harder.
Second, each product team had valid reasons to optimize locally, but those local decisions could not break the larger customer journey. My job was to help teams make decisions that worked for their product while strengthening the system as a whole.
Reframing the Loan Officer Guided Experience
The original ask was to design screens for a one-call workflow. I reframed the problem.
Borrowers were giving Lower information through earlier digital steps, but loan officers were still asking for some of that information again on the call. That repetition created a trust problem. Instead of feeling like the company knew them, borrowers had to re-explain themselves.
I shifted the design question from:
“How do we help loan officers complete a call?”
to:
“How do we help the loan officer prove to the borrower that Lower already knows them?”
That reframing changed the product direction. The experience became less about data collection and more about continuity, confidence, and guided decision-making.
Product Strategy Principles
To keep the work aligned across products, I used a few principles to guide design decisions:
Never make the borrower repeat what Lower already knows. Repeated questions were not just workflow friction; they were a trust problem.
Reduce borrower friction without increasing loan officer burden. Every borrower-facing simplification had to make the loan officer’s work clearer, faster, or more confident.
Design shared flows that can branch by product. FHA, VA, HELOC, and conventional loan paths needed product-specific logic without requiring separate rebuilt experiences.
Create patterns teams can use without me in the room. The design system, documentation, and Figma-to-config guidance had to help teams make consistent decisions independently.
Key Design Decisions
I designed the experience at high fidelity from the beginning because the complexity lived in the details. Edge cases like frozen credit scores, inline tradeline editing, pricing-tied payment visualization, and conditional loan paths were not visible in low-fidelity flows.
I built a fully populated POS prototype instead of reviewing empty screens. Walking through the real end state surfaced places where we were about to ask borrowers for information they had already provided.
I also advocated for a conditional flow architecture so shared workflows could branch at the question level by product type. That decision allowed FHA, VA, and HELOC paths to scale through configuration instead of requiring separate rebuilds.
Throughout the process, I worked closely with sales leadership, product, and engineering. I brought leadership feedback back into the Figma file within the same week so decisions could be resolved before engineering began implementation.
Building the Lower design system across products
In parallel, I led design system work across Lower and Movoto.
The simple version of the project would have been asking Movoto to adopt Lower’s existing library. I pushed against that. A design system cannot work as a mandate if the teams using it do not see their needs reflected in it.
Instead, I treated the system as a shared architecture. It had to absorb Movoto’s patterns, support marketing needs, and give product teams a foundation they could build from.
I led the Figma workspace merge across Brand Marketing, Lifecycle Marketing, and Movoto with no downtime. I also co-authored a four-layer system architecture:
Brand → Tokens → Product Components → Marketing Components
That structure gave teams a shared foundation while preserving the flexibility each surface needed.
Creating leverage beyond the screen
Because Lower had one designer supporting many product and engineering needs, I focused on work that could scale beyond my direct involvement.
I created cross-system documentation, reusable field grouping patterns, and a Figma-to-config translation guide so design decisions could move more clearly into engineering. I also helped identify gaps between Figma and Jira as a design operations problem, not just an engineering handoff issue.
This changed the role design played in the organization. Instead of design being a final visual layer, it became a shared operating system for product quality, consistency, and delivery.
Impact
The work helped Lower move toward a more connected mortgage experience across borrower-facing, loan officer, marketing, and internal product surfaces.
The Loan Officer Guided Experience launched in alpha with conventional refinance and expanded toward FHA. The design system grew to support nine products. The Lower and Movoto workspace merge gave teams a shared foundation without disrupting active work.
One representative outcome came during the Lower.com migration from Webflow to HubSpot: roughly 15 hours of component-template work saved the lead engineer four to five days and helped put the migration a week ahead of schedule.
Reflection
The biggest shift in this work was where my design effort created value.
Earlier in my career, my impact was often measured by the quality of the screens I shipped. At Lower, the measure became whether the organization could make better design decisions when I was not in the room.
The work I am proudest of was not only visual. It was the reframing: treating the Guided Experience as a borrower-trust problem, treating the design system as a co-owned product foundation, and treating handoff gaps as design responsibilities.
Those reframes changed the shape of the work. The visual design followed.