Overview
GFT Group is a global IT services company specializing in digital transformation for the financial industry. During my time there I built real-time trading dashboards for investment firms with Angular, D3.js and WebSockets, keeping data latency under 1 second — but the moment that stood out was when GFT asked me to lead a 5-day design sprint for a different client initiative: a product concept the client's leadership was evaluating and needed validated before committing to build.
The Challenge
A Brazilian financial services client was exploring a new digital product: an app that would use their own financial products to guide customers through a structured financial planning process, helping them get out of debt and stabilize their finances. The concept existed at the board level but had no validated shape. The question wasn't whether to build it — it was whether the idea would actually work for real users. We had five days to find out.
My Role & Process
Facilitating the Sprint
- Led the full design sprint, with a fellow designer working alongside me and client stakeholders from product, business, and marketing participating throughout
- Structured the week across problem definition, ideation, prototyping, and user testing — keeping the client's team aligned and moving at each stage
- Translated the board-level product concept into concrete user flows and screens within the five-day timeframe
Design & Validation
- Built a high-fidelity interactive prototype of the financial planning app — covering onboarding, debt assessment, and the product recommendation flow
- Ran user testing sessions with real target users on the final day, validating the core hypothesis: that a guided, product-linked financial planning tool would resonate and be understood
- Synthesized findings and presented conclusions and the tested prototype to the client's board at the end of the sprint
Results & Impact
The design sprint convinced the client's board: the concept was validated in five days of structured design work, ending with user testing on the final day. That same year, I also placed 1st in GFT's internal Agile Challenge 2018, a company-wide competition run across all development teams as part of GFT's Agile transformation program.
