2 acquired companies
Disparate tech stacks created massive redundancies with no integration strategy
Scaling Finance.
Unified foundations and shared primitives for payment systems spanning five business verticals and three revenue streams.
- Challenge
- Spotify’s commerce ecosystem had grown fast across many teams, and the complexity had compounded. Pay-ins were somewhat standardized. Pay-outs lived in nine different tools, five verticals, and three revenue streams, each team using its own vocabulary for the same work. The task was to design the foundations that let the whole system start operating as one.
- My Role
- Senior Service Designer for financial engineering foundations. Owned the discovery, the information architecture, and the cross-product systems work. Partnered with engineering and product leadership on strategy and with a domain SME on shared vocabulary.
- Team Structure
- Me as Senior Service Designer, product partners across verticals, tech partners across pay-in and pay-out systems.
- Impact
- A shared vocabulary, a decisioning framework, and a capability catalogue that gave Spotify’s financial engineering org one way of operating across verticals. GTM timelines moved 18% faster. The navigation framework and information architecture continue to underpin Spotify’s expanding commerce ecosystem.
Overview
Spotify had grown into a commerce ecosystem that touched every corner of the product — subscriptions, ads, merch, podcasts, licensing — and the systems that moved money across those surfaces had grown with it. Fast, locally, and in parallel. By the time this project started, finance was running on nine different pay-out tools, five business verticals, three revenue streams, and no shared way of talking about any of it.
The frame I brought in: this wasn’t a tooling problem. It was a language problem. When teams use different words for the same thing, every cross-functional meeting starts from zero. Every new business model has to re-explain itself from the ground up. Every GTM takes longer than it should. The foundational design move wasn’t to pick a better tool. It was to give the organization a shared vocabulary strong enough that the systems underneath could finally talk to each other.
15 bespoke tool solutions
Teams built bespoke solutions for each unique user type which limited scale of any tool
No single source of truth
Data was unable to flow through the ecosystem causing a reliance on manual reconciliation
Mapping the complexity
Disparate onboardingEach product had its own onboarding tool. Launching something new meant first finding the right entry point, then learning a workflow that did not connect to the systems around it.
The findings
Finding 01
Complexity concentrated in payouts, where every vertical relied on its own bespoke tooling.
Finding 02
Nine tools assessed with a jobs-to-be-done lens across ownership, capabilities, and dependencies.
Finding 03
User scale ranged from individual creators to enterprise clients needing white-glove support.
Finding 04
Less mature areas ran on manual spreadsheets; others used configurable tools with real reuse potential.
Finding 05
Almost no tooling overlap between payins and payouts beyond the general ledger.
Finding 06
That gap became the opening to connect both sides and improve end-to-end data flow.
GTM Strategy
Use-Case Framework gives teams a structured way to navigate the commerce ecosystem. By mapping the full lifecycle of a business model — what is sold, how, to whom, and how it’s fulfilled, paid for, and accounted for — it clarifies the services and capabilities needed to go to market. Pre-approved, scalable “Golden Paths” let teams fast-track decisions. Configurable but less mature paths were flagged for further discovery, while unsupported approaches were marked as off-road, surfacing risks and dependencies early.
Every business model reads across four groups: how money comes in, how revenue is shared, how money goes out, and the scale it has to work at.
Pay in
Segment
Consumer
Business
Product
Digital
Physical
Purchase
Subscriptn.
Usage
OTP
Fulfillment
Immediate
Deferred
Revenue
Supply
Reseller
Affiliate
Marketplace
1st party
Cost
Rev share
Commission
Fixed
Pay out
Segment
Creator
Enterprise
Top-tier
None
Payment
Immediate
Advanced
Deferred
Claims
Scale
Volume
High
Mid
Low
Market
Mature
Mid-tier
Emerging
52 interviews
Cross-functional conversations grounded the ecosystem map in the people operating it every day.
3 divisions
A shared language connected product, finance, and engineering decisions.
18% faster
Clearer golden paths and earlier visibility into dependencies accelerated go-to-market timelines.
15 flows streamlined
Reduced complexity by streamlining flows across the ecosystem.
Outcomes
Through the financial tooling work I positioned design as a real partner in UI, systems, and strategy. I worked to establish the approach of simplifying both our process as well as the tool itself so that we can scale fast and do more with less.
