PayPal Guest Checkout
Client
PayPal Guest Checkout
Role: Sr. UX Manager | Team: 2 Designers | Timeline: 2024–2025
Leadership Journey: The Challenge
Guest checkout was a high-traffic entry point for PayPal but had major problems: it was slow, cluttered, and prone to abandonment. Many users preferred to pay as guests, yet the experience lacked clarity and felt riskier compared to branded checkout or competitors like Shop Pay. Merchants complained about drop-offs, and consumers were losing trust in the flow.
The business needed a streamlined, trustworthy guest checkout that:
Reduced friction and drop-offs.
Built trust and transparency for non-logged-in users.
Aligned visually and technically with PayPal’s evolving checkout platform.
Delivered parity (or better) compared to competitive accelerated guest experiences.
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.
