Fastlane by PayPal
Client
PayPal
Role: Sr. UX Manager | Team: 4 Designers | Timeline: 2023–2025
Leadership Journey: The Challenge
PayPal’s guest checkout was underperforming: too slow, too many drop-offs, and falling behind competitors like Shop Pay and Amazon Pay. The business needed a 0→1 product that could dramatically improve conversion, reduce checkout time, and scale globally under a tight deadline and with high executive visibility.
Scope of Work
My Role and Team
As Sr. UX Manager:
Led a team of 4 designers through 0→1 discovery, MVP launch, and global scaling.
Facilitated cross-functional alignment with 12+ partners in product, engineering, research, and content during a production sprint to deliver the MVP in just 1 month.
Balanced design vision, business strategy, and global compliance, guiding the team through critical pivots.
Represented design in executive and partnership conversations, helping secure buy-in and credibility with external partners.
Leadership Moves
MVP at Speed: Orchestrated a production sprint with 12+ stakeholders, delivering validated designs in 1 month and launching with 6+ BigCommerce merchants in 3 months.
Foundations: Extended brand assets, built a new design system, and set integration guidelines that drove quality and boosted conversions to 80%.
Partnerships: Helped pitch and land BigCommerce, then secured Amazon, Meta, and Mastercard, fueling adoption.
Global Scale: Guided rollout to UK, EU, and Australia in mid-2025, solving compliance and identity challenges.
Future Vision: Created a video “trailer” narrative to win exec buy-in for the next phases.
Results and Impact
80% conversion rates (on par with PayPal branded checkout at 82%).
24K new profiles created, 36% avg. conversion (vs. Shopify’s 25%).
Checkout <3 seconds, faster than Shop Pay’s 5.4s.
Global rollout from U.S. MVP in Fall 2024 to UK, EU, and Australia in mid-2025.
Positioned Fastlane as PayPal’s flagship accelerated checkout product.
Leadership Takeaway
Fastlane wasn’t one big launch, it was a series of critical turning points. My impact was stepping in to facilitate the right solutions at the right time: creating urgency, building scalable systems, driving partnerships, enabling global expansion, and inspiring executive buy-in. This was design leadership as a driver of business transformation.
