Connor Gettel

A design leader who still ships code.

VP of Design with a decade across two fast-scaling fintechs. I take the knowledge that lives in one person's head and put it in everyone's hands — through code-first design systems, AI agents, and Figma plugins.

Design leadership

at MoonPay

  • Scaled Staff IC → VP of Product Design across a decade in fintech.
  • Led 12 across product and content through MoonPay's biggest org reset.
  • Rebuilt the design team against a higher bar — offboardings, re-hires, the full reset.
  • Ran the hiring pipeline myself on a 5-day SLA when the talent function was at capacity.
  • Built career-growth frameworks and promotion tracks — made progression legible across product + content design.
  • Moved hours from meetings to craft — redesigned team rituals, kept the social cadence intact.
  • Elevated design critique — tighter format, sharper questions, tooling that raised the floor on thinking.
  • Became the design system's de facto steward — contributed patterns, drove governance, educated the team, held the bar on usage.
  • Shifted design to AI-native workflows — tooling and systematisation as defaults.
  • Eliminated the need for two approved hires — shipped a content governance tool + canvas-aware design co-pilot that replaced the function.

Cross-functional influence

across Product, Engineering, and C-suite

  • Pitched the Blocks operating-model bet to VP Product + VP Engineering as a Staff IC.
  • Shaped MoonPay's PED restructure in partnership with the incoming SVP of Product + CTO.
  • Advised the FCA on UX — led MoonPay's first Financial Promotion Standard implementation.
  • Retention calls held key Product, Design, and Engineering hires through MoonPay's acquisition-era turbulence.
  • Mentored engineers and PMs through the org reset; pushed cross-functional promotions.
  • Design co-pilot adopted by PMs unprompted — cross-functional pull without mandate.
  • Moved the business, not just the design — architectural moves tied to hard commercial outcomes (dup accounts −30%, EDD 2mo → <48h, KYC +15%, CVR +20%).

Architecture & operating models

across MoonPay and Curve

  • Conceived and led Blocks — MoonPay's 13-month modular product re-architecture.
  • Drove a PED-wide restructure (~120 people) around capability-aligned ownership.
  • Drove duplicate account creation down 30% in 2 quarters — enabled once Auth stood alone.
  • Cut EDD turnaround from 2 months to <48h for top-spend customers — enabled by identity-flow independence.
  • Lifted KYC pass rates 15% — triggered identity as 'spend readiness' outside the transaction flow.
  • Made cross-ramp consistency structural — Sends shipped visually + behaviourally aligned with every other ramp by default, via the shared engine.
  • Lifted signup → first-transaction CVR 20%+ in some markets — unbundled Curve's onboarding monolith into modular, experimentable flow, years before Blocks.
  • Still runs MoonPay's ramp stack — survived leadership changes and my exit.

Product range

across MoonPay and Curve

  • ThemeIDs (MoonPay) — partner theming at 50+ wallets including bitcoin.com; a core pillar of enterprise sales, conceived as a Staff IC.
  • MoonPay consumer app redesign — unified CeFi + DeFi into a single trading experience.
  • Samsung Pay+ (Curve) — designed and named in Suwon with Samsung UK; 100% terminal acceptance vs ~30% without; live today at samsung.com/uk.
  • Curve Metal (Curve) — one of fintech's first metal Mastercard products; R&D on card mechanics and industrial design end-to-end; partnered with Gemalto, Thales, Nightcrest and Burgopak.
  • ~6% of users adopted the subscription tier for the card design alone.
  • Amex Top-up (Curve) — designed the top-up flow letting users spend from an Amex-funded pot.

IC to VP across

a decade

of fintech product design.

Scaled design through

Series A → C

at two fast-scaling fintechs.

Operates across

4 altitudes

Systems, architecture, team, org.

Leader of

12 designers

across product & content, as VP.

Leadership at MoonPay

Design at every altitude.

Three leadership decisions — re-architected the product stack into composable capabilities, systematised content review into a tool, gave every designer access to principal-level thinking. Same pattern: systematise the expertise, scale without scaling headcount.

SystemIQ — A Bet

The line between design and engineering is dissolving.

Design systems drift. Handoffs lose context. Tools don't talk to each other. These aren't tooling problems — they're architectural ones. SystemIQ is my bet on where this ends: a code-first system, an AI builder, and a live Figma bridge. An ongoing solo build.

For love

Built for love, not briefs.

Side projects with no stakeholders and no deadlines — just things I wanted to exist, built in whatever medium the thing demands. Every one shipped.

How I think about the work

Small teams should feel bigger than they are.

I'd rather have a small team with superpowers than a big team with layers. Automation, tooling, and systems that give every designer access to expertise that would normally require dedicated headcount. When the repeatable work is handled by the system, people focus on the work that actually needs them.

Build the thing you never had.

The best tools I've built are the ones I wished existed when I was learning. Tools that coach, that help people make better decisions, that surface what they haven't considered. Every designer should have access to a senior thinking partner who's always available — not just the ones lucky enough to have great mentorship.

The line between design and engineering is dissolving.

I was writing code before I ever opened a design tool. AI removed the ceiling — now I ship plugins, agents, and native apps alongside the design work. The thinking is mine. The syntax isn't always mine. Designers who aren't building, unless they're exceptional at something else, won't survive this decade.

Make yourself redundant.

Build the infrastructure so the team doesn't depend on any one person — including you. The knowledge that lives in someone's head should live in the system. The repeatable work should be automated. The people should be freed for the work that only people can do.

Have something worth building?

connorgettel@me.com