PayPal Identity
Company:
PayPal Identity
Role: Sr. UX Manager | Timeline: 2024–2025
The Challenge
PayPal needed to meet new global MFA compliance regulations, and the Login Identity team responsible for authentication across all PayPal surfaces landed in my scope without a leader. The team was behind on Passkey delivery across App, Web, and Checkout, and leadership needed it live in two weeks.
I had zero background in authentication, but I stepped in fast. I suggested a design handoff sprint and ran scrappy user testing on early concepts, which led to a passkey framework pitch. I then built alignment with product and engineering to get ahead of the pile of use cases across 3 surfaces. What started as a rescue mission turned into an opportunity to build a scalable framework for how PayPal designs secure login experiences across every platform.
Role & Scope
Took ownership of the Login Identity team mid-project, leading 1 designer, content, and research under urgent delivery deadlines.
Created a Passkey framework to unify design across App, Web, and Checkout, three different surfaces, three different design systems, and no centralized Figma source of truth.
Kept leadership informed through weekly check-ins, visual progress maps, and clear dependency management across orgs.
Pitched the scalable Passkey design framework to executive leadership, showing how a fragmented team could deliver speed and consistency.
How I (Ship. Learn. Lead)
Shipped the first phase of Passkey enrollment and login flows in under 3 weeks, meeting compliance deadlines while establishing a long-term scalable system.
Learned fast through quick-turn user testing, design audits, and live surface reviews, identifying gaps in comprehension, UI, and edge cases across mobile and web.
Led by organizing chaos: turned a 2-week emergency into a 3-month rolling handoff that included experimentation, framework creation, and global rollout planning.
Partnered closely with Product and Engineering to define principles for trust, recovery, and fallback, work that later became the blueprint for PayPal’s identity vision.
Key results
+9.0% passkey success increase on iOS; +21.4% on MacOS
US Passkey GTM: 22% of checkouts were now passkey-enabled
+65 bps lift in Login Success Rate and +9.3% overall success
Framework adopted across identity and checkout surfaces for future rollouts
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