Design at scale: how to maintain excellence when your product never stops growing

Written by: Nubank Editorial

For a long time, dealing with financial products meant facing long lines, bureaucratic processes, and inefficient experiences. Getting simple tasks done required a good deal of patience.

That started to change when Nu put financial services in people’s pockets. From that point on, what used to be complex and time-consuming could be resolved in just a few taps, with more autonomy, clarity, and speed.

This shift didn’t just transform the experience — it redefined what people expect. Over time, simplicity and transparency went from being differentiators to being the bare minimum.

In a context where expectations keep evolving, the challenge is no longer just about building great experiences — it’s about sustaining them over time, even as the product, its complexity, and the teams involved continue to grow.

In this article, we share how we do this in practice and how we continue raising the bar for experience in the financial sector.

When quality becomes the starting point

With more options available, customers’ expectations have risen.

With the emergence of Nu and the rise of digital banks, clear, fast, and consistent experiences have become the baseline. Smooth interactions, predictable navigation, and instant responses are now part of the standard.

In this context, quality becomes the starting point.

The real differentiator lies in the ability to maintain that level of excellence consistently, even as the product evolves.

Growth as a driver of consistency

As digital products grow, new features are added and more teams begin contributing to the product.

When well-structured, this growth allows the experience to evolve without increasing complexity.

In practice, this requires coordination across different areas to ensure product decisions are made in an integrated way. At Nu, one example is the work around aligning the app’s navigation structure, such as defining the main tabs. This type of decision is made collaboratively, connecting different areas around a shared logic of organization and prioritization.

This same principle extends to other parts of the experience. In flows like payments, for instance, ensuring a consistent logic across different contexts allows the product to evolve while maintaining predictability for users, regardless of where the interaction takes place.

This approach enables multiple teams to work in parallel without compromising the product’s coherence, maintaining an experience that develops in an integrated way.

Clarity in an ever-evolving product

As the product evolves, different types of features begin to coexist. Some solve core problems and shape the experience. Others complement and expand the value delivered to customers.

Maintaining clarity in this context depends on a continuous prioritization process, where what’s essential stays clear even as new possibilities emerge.

When this process is well-established, growth doesn’t compromise the experience. On the contrary: it allows the product to expand while maintaining simplicity, with each new feature playing a clear role within the user journey.

Design as a system

Ensuring consistency at scale requires looking beyond the interface. In complex products, the experience often reflects how teams are organized.

When different areas work independently, users end up exposed to that fragmentation — with parts of the product following different logics or failing to connect with each other. This kind of problem can’t be solved with visual tweaks alone.

It requires treating design as part of a broader system — one that connects product, engineering, and organizational structure — to ensure that local decisions don’t compromise the overall experience.

In practice, this means building mechanisms that sustain that consistency. Here, we have systems like the Nu Design System (NuDS), which defines shared interaction and interface standards, and initiatives like App Experience (AXP), which help connect these decisions across different parts of the product.

This approach allows the experience to evolve in a coordinated way, maintaining coherence across different contexts.

Anticipating complexity before it shows up

It’s essential to create mechanisms that make challenges visible before they become entrenched.

This involves closely monitoring how the product is used and fostering continuous alignment among teams, ensuring that different parts of the product evolve in an integrated way.

At Nu, this alignment happens through structured routines, such as recurring design review sessions that bring together different areas of the company around decisions about the product’s evolution. In these sessions, teams discuss information architecture, utility, and experience collaboratively, ensuring consistency even before implementation.

This approach keeps navigation structures clear, enables different areas to evolve in a coordinated manner, and ensures that key surfaces remain predictable and easy to use, even as product complexity increases.

Performance as part of the standard

More than ever, product performance plays a major role in the user experience. App launch time, screen loading, and response to interactions directly influence the perception of quality — and these are pillars of Nu’s approach to UX.

Performance is directly tied to the perception of fluidity, and interactions that respond consistently and predictably contribute to a more reliable experience.

That’s why it must be part of the experience from the very beginning.

Engineering as part of the experience

As the bar continues to rise, experience quality increasingly depends on how the product is built — and that requires a shift in approach.

At Nu, Engineering teams don’t just execute — they actively participate in shaping the experience. This includes iterating more frequently, testing solutions in environments closer to the real product, and continuously fine-tuning interaction details.

Here, this kind of work doesn’t happen in long, isolated cycles. It demands proximity, constant feedback, and attention to detail.

Scaling with consistency

Scaling digital products today is no longer just about adding features or expanding capabilities.

The real challenge is different: how to maintain consistency, simplicity, and quality as the product grows in complexity.

As we’ve seen, experience issues are rarely confined to the interface. They stem from how decisions are made, how systems evolve, and how different parts of the product connect — or fail to connect.

In a landscape where multiple products do the same thing, how they work is what determines which one people keep choosing.

Our approach reduces inconsistencies and allows teams to focus on solving real problems. That’s what enables us not only to keep pace with the market, but to help define where it’s heading.