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Connor Gettel

Design leader scaling craft through systems.

A decade of design leadership across two fast-scaling fintechs. I stay in the craft myself, then build the systems, tools, and teams that make a high bar the team's default, not something one person has to hold.

Design leadership

at MoonPay

  • Scaled Staff IC → VP of Product Design across a decade in fintech, without ever leaving the craft.
  • Led 12 across product and content through MoonPay's biggest org reset. Rebuilt the 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 and content design.
  • Led by building, not just directing. Systematised content review into a weekend tool, then a canvas-aware Figma plugin: same expertise, multiplied to every delivery team. Turned two approved hires into ~£650k/yr avoided, one redirected to systems work, one cancelled.
  • Raised the floor on thinking. Elevated design critique, moved hours from meetings to craft, shifted the team to AI-native workflows by default.
  • Became the design system's de facto steward. Contributed patterns, drove governance, held the bar on usage.

Cross-functional influence

across Product, Engineering, and C-suite

  • Pitched the Blocks operating-model bet to VP Product and VP Engineering as a Staff IC.
  • Shaped MoonPay's PED restructure in partnership with the incoming SVP of Product and 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. Tied every architectural bet to a commercial outcome the C-suite could underwrite. That's how a design-led restructure got greenlit.

Architecture & operating models

across MoonPay and Curve

  • Rebuilt MoonPay's ~$2B/yr ramp to feel native in every product it serves. Auth as an inset shell, the verification code arriving as a keyboard suggestion, every improvement a subtraction.
  • The craft forced the operating model. ~120 people into capability squads, one designer and one PM per block. I drew the frame and fought for it.
  • Won XP, the first design-systems team in MoonPay's history. Codified in Figma and code, stood up ahead of the reorg to prove the model.
  • Owned blocks inherited improvements automatically. The block owners drove the numbers; every product compounded them. KYC +15%, EDD 2 months → <48h, payment CVR +20% in some markets.
  • Proved the model at Curve years earlier. Unbundled the onboarding monolith into modular, experimentable flow; signup → first-transaction CVR +20% in some markets.
  • Still runs MoonPay's ramp stack. Survived leadership changes and my exit; the bar kept rising without anyone holding it.

Product range

across MoonPay and Curve

  • ThemeIDs (MoonPay). As a Staff IC, refactored the ramp's entire colour system into semantic tokens borrowed from Apple. Won Rainbow, a wallet that had rejected us on craft, then theming at 50+ partners including bitcoin.com.
  • 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. Owned card mechanics and industrial design end-to-end with Gemalto, Thales, Nightcrest and Burgopak; ~6% of users took 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.

Rebuilt the

$2B/yr

ramp that runs MoonPay today.

Leader of

12 designers

across product & content, as VP.

Leadership at MoonPay

Design at every altitude.

Two decisions at MoonPay, at different altitudes. Rebuilding the ramp by hand, then restructuring how the design function staffs itself.

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

Restraint is the craft.

The best move is almost always subtraction. Adding is easy: another feature, another flourish, one more option. Taking things away until only what matters is left is the hard part, and that's where the craft lives.

Quality is inherited, not policed.

You can't hold a quality bar by watching everyone's work. It doesn't scale, and it makes you the bottleneck. Build the bar into the thing everyone uses, and one person's best becomes the floor for the rest, rising long after you've gone. A standard you have to enforce isn't a standard. It's a queue.

Systematise the access, not the expert.

The problem is rarely a shortage of expertise. It's that the expertise isn't there the moment someone needs it. More experts doesn't fix that, it just adds more people to wait on. Put the knowledge where the work happens and everyone has it at once. The expert stops being a bottleneck and becomes the author of the standard.

Taste is the thing that can't be faked.

Anything that can be automated will be. The polish, the production, the busywork, all of it gets cheaper by the month. What's left is judgment: whether the thing is any good, and the harder call, when to kill something you love because it's stopped serving the work. That part doesn't commoditise.

Have something worth building?

connorgettel@me.com