Mauricio Armenio

Buenos Aires, Argentina

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Product Designer & DesignOps Specialist

I designed for:

  • Telecom
  • Personal Pay
  • Ueno Bank
  • Banco Ciudad
  • Red Link

Personal Pay

One system to rule them all

Design Lead · Design Ops · Design Systems

One design system for two countries. I led the creation of Fractal at Personal Pay: in 6 months it unified the Argentina and Paraguay apps, migrated 100% of the ecosystem to Figma and transformed design rituals across every squad, adapting to both web and app.

Personal Pay app on a phone: balance, Visa card, shortcuts and a benefits banner.

What it was about

  • Design leadership

    A core squad of 4 designers, with cross-functional management of teams, processes and design culture across the whole organization.

  • A complete ecosystem

    Migration to Figma with tokens, variables and shared libraries for React and React Native, plus governance guidelines and documentation.

  • Extended team

    Co-creation with Tech Leads and PMs across every product squad. Critique and ideation rituals, and a standardized hand-off to Frontend.

The problem

Inconsistency, silos and operational debt

Personal Pay was growing fast and adding squads in parallel, but its design operation wasn't ready to scale: there was no centralized system, each team worked in isolation and the lack of shared processes limited the area's strategic impact.

  • Visual fragmentation

    Squads working in isolated files with no unified libraries, producing inconsistent components across sections and products, in both app and web.

  • Operational overload and silos

    Isolated designers spending most of each sprint building high-fidelity UI from scratch, taking time away from product ideation and validation.

  • Ambiguous hand-off to frontend

    No shared tokens or delivery criteria, leading to manual interpretation, constant rework in code and technical debt in development.

The strategy

Three DesignOps pillars in 6 months

To transform how the team operated without stopping product sprints, I led a core squad of 4 designers, coordinating across every squad around three workstreams:

  • Unified ecosystem

    • 80/20 rule: we standardized the 20% of components that covered 80% of the flows.
    • Multi-theme tokens: Figma variables with Light/Dark Mode support and brand subsystems.
    • Full migration: 100% of files and squads moved from Sketch to Figma.

  • Design/code alliance

    • 1:1 naming: tokens and props aligned between Figma and code (React and React Native).
    • Weekly syncs: technical validation with Tech Leads before publishing components.
    • Standardized hand-off: living documentation in Storybook with direct parity in production.

  • Culture and governance

    • Weekly Design Critiques and feedback to align criteria and break silos before moving to UI.
    • Ideation and co-design sessions with PMs and business, focused on solving problems.
    • An agile protocol so any squad could propose or iterate on components without getting blocked.

Before and after

The interface, transformed

The system didn't just set processes and working standards: it also unified the interface and made the app consistent across all of its main sections. The next step would be migrating the features.

The results

Operational efficiency, scale and cultural maturity

In 6 months, Personal Pay went from operating in silos with outdated tools to a design culture connected to code and focused on solving business problems.

  • 100%

    Full migration of files and squads from Sketch to Figma in 6 months, with core components that cut high-fidelity design time from weeks to days, consolidated over the following months.

  • -40%

    Shorter delivery times thanks to shared tokens, aligned naming and a direct hand-off to development, drastically reducing time to market.

  • 3x

    More time devoted to research and strategy instead of operational UI work. Cross-team ideation and critique spaces were consolidated, even with other disciplines.

“Fractal proved that a design system isn't a Figma file, but an internal product that lives in code and in people. Its success came from building it together with frontend and prioritizing cross-team adoption over theoretical perfection.”

Bonus track

Why Fractal?

  • Collective ideation

    We created ideation spaces within the design team and extended them to product, technology and marketing. The name had to capture how a design system works.

  • Infinite patterns

    A fractal is a geometric object whose structure repeats at different scales. Its smallest parts have the same shape as the whole — like snowflakes or fern leaves.

  • A living organism

    The metaphor was a perfect fit: a design system also replicates at different scales, grows organically and stays coherent at every level. The logo mark reflects that repetition.

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