RewardExpert helps travellers get more out of airline miles, loyalty points and credit cards. US company with R&D in Kyiv. I joined as Lead Designer. There was no design function: no process, no visual language, no system, and a product surface already growing across several teams. The company needed a way to design and ship several products at once.

Users couldn't tell what a reward ticket actually cost them. Miles, cash prices, fees and programme valuations lived in different places, so people either overpaid or gave up and booked with cash. Interviews and support tickets kept landing on the same sentence: not "I can't find flights", but "I can't tell if this is a good deal".

Underneath that, every feature was being designed from scratch. Nothing was reusable, and the company was planning more products than that approach could carry.

I ran the first round of research myself. Interviews, support ticket analysis, time spent sitting with the support team watching where people gave up.

Then I set up a rhythm the team could run without me: standups and planning to keep delivery moving, critique to hold one quality bar across three products, and regular sharing so research and decisions didn't stay inside one designer's head. So, product decisions came from evidence the whole team had seen.

The first flight search built around miles rather than cash. Valuation goes directly into the result: miles, fees and a value rating side by side, so a reward booking can be compared to a cash fare without doing maths.

On mobile, every filter stays visible rather than hidden behind a menu. Filtering is the task in this product, not a secondary action.

A comparison tool organised by what someone is trying to get (no annual fee, lounge access, miles, cash back) rather than by which bank issues it.

For people who already know what they want. Research showed the unmet need was speed, so the flow fits on a phone screen and ends with a ticket.

I led design across all three products, and the landing page was where they had to come together as one company: Travel, Credit Cards and Concierge on a single page, in one visual language, from the same components.

The SEO content pages were built the same way, and they held attention. Page depth was consistently strong: people came in for one answer and kept reading.

RewardExpert taught me where the leverage is. It's in the team, the system and the process underneath them. Owning both design and frontend meant the system got built once and used everywhere. That's what let a team of six ship three products in a domain this complicated.