0 to 1 design of an MVP for a sandbox environment and self sign up flow to help payment novice software platforms launch payments faster with NMI.
My role
Design Lead
My team
3 Engineers, Product Manager, Director of Product
NMI is a payments gateway that enables software platforms to accept payments through its APIs. However, developers had no way to explore or test integrations independently, and the only way to sign up was through a sales-led process that took several weeks and multiple human touchpoints. The absence of a sandbox environment, clear documentation, and self-service sign-up eroded partner confidence—leading many prospective platforms to choose competitors like Stripe, who offered faster, self-serve options.
Throughout the initiative, I advocated for design to lead problem definition—helping shift teams from solution-first thinking to user-and-behavior-first framing.
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Through concept testing with both personas, I validated assumptions around decision points, behavioral signals, and moments of friction. In collaboration with my product partner, we used these insights and the journey map to guide where to embed behavioral analytics and event logging, allowing us to track critical actions and optimize the experience toward faster time-to-launch.
As a small, fast-moving product/engineering/design team, we took an iterative release approach, continuously shipping small, high-impact features to learn and adapt:
Enabled test API keys and launched our first set of developer guides and recipes.
Will introduce product-led pricing and self-sign-up flows for economic decision makers.
Will focus on optimizing the developer experience and expanding integration guides based on usage feedback.
This approach allowed us to learn from real behaviors, validate assumptions early, and keep improving the experience incrementally rather than waiting to ship a large, risky release.
We are continuing to release incremental updates to the integration guide, sandbox environment, and self-service sign-up flow, enabling developers to test APIs and platforms to onboard within minutes instead of weeks. The first and second releases helped close some gaps with competitors like Stripe and provided early-stage platforms with faster evaluation tools.
Persona: Developer
Optimize the developer experience with expanded integration guides
Improve the self-sign-up funnel through A/B testing and iterative enhancements
I helped shift NMI's onboarding model from sales-driven to product-led
I expanded design influence by embedding behavioral data into product iteration loops
I established design-led collaboration norms ('Collab Space') for future initiatives
I built momentum for a faster, research-driven product culture across teams
"I've worked with vendors before that offer payment processing and I think this is a game changer. This avoids back and forth emails. This gives me the ability to touch the product and speak to our customers, and say hey, this is what we have to do to get set up, instead of waiting for the vendor to come back with unclear direction."
- Prospective partner
From several weeks to under 3 days
Through sandbox access and clear documentation
For economic decision makers evaluating the platform
