The Career Route: From Global Creative Agency AKQA to Figure

10+Years in the field
4Companies
1 IPOCompany went public
0 to 1Product Design
15Designers led
Elevation — Career trajectory
AKQA2015–16
SoFi2016–17
Figure2017–22
Break2022–24
Figure2024–25
3DBP2026–
6 Segments — Career stops
1

3DBP

Independent product design consulting.

2026–Present ·
Product Design Consultant
Active now
2

Figure

Returned to lead product design through Figure’s next chapter.

2024–2025 ·
Senior Director of Product Design
Company Went Public
3

Career break

Traveling, exploring new hobbies, riding bikes.

2022–2024
Travel Sabbatical
4

Figure

Joined as Figure’s first designer at 8 people; grew the design org to 15 and helped scale the company past 500 employees across 8 offices.

2017–2022 ·
Head of Design, Lead Product Designer
0 to 1 Named the Company
5

SoFi

Where the financial-services design focus began.

2016–2017 ·
Product Designer
Fintech
6

AKQA

Designed responsive UI/UX for major consumer brands at a global creative agency.

2015–2016 ·
UX Designer
Agency
Athlete Bio
Product Design Leader
10+ years designing · cyclist

I’m Ricky Navarro. I’ve spent the last 10 years getting to experience the rare opportunity of working at a start-up from the founder’s home to seeing it go public. I’ve also spent numerous late nights meeting tight deadlines at agencies, where that’s the norm for most projects — and where I’ve met a lot of my best friends along the way.

Off the clock: cyclist, tinkerer of anything creative, bulldog owner, LeBron fan (but never got a Lakers jersey), and really into ceramics lately. My passions have made me learn that you sometimes have to endure tough struggles in order to experience the best routes — on the bike or in a career.

Apps currently using
Figma
Claude
Cursor
UX Pilot
Lovable
Core competencies
Conversion-Driven Design
Design Systems & Unification
Design Team Building & Leadership
Cross-Functional Collaboration
UX Research & Testing
Design Culture & Mentorship

Home Equity Line Application

Shipped
Project timeline — 2025
ResearchJan–Feb
DesignApr
ApprovalJun
DevelopmentAug–Sep

Goal & business impact

We needed to improve the HELOC top-of-funnel conversion rate — the step between starting an application and actually selecting a product. Most of the drop-off was happening early, so the focus became redesigning that initial experience to keep people moving forward.

Team

Product, Marketing, Engineering, Customer Operations, and Design — I drove consensus across all five groups.

Key constraints & insights

  • Design constraint. Users were split almost exactly 50/50 between mobile and desktop, so everything had to work seamlessly on both, running on a single shared codebase.
  • Actionable insight. We grounded every decision in real behavior — pairing what people told us on customer calls with what we saw in Fullstory heatmaps and session recordings.
HELOC application redesign mobile screens: property details, verification, income, and confirmation steps
My role through the project — 2025
1ResearchJan–Feb

Kicked things off with qualitative research, partnering with Customer Operations to pull together the user insights we needed.

Ran a competitive analysis to set a benchmark and shape our strategic direction.

Worked with Product and Marketing to prioritize feature concepts and lock down initial scope.

2DesignApr

Explored broad design directions for the core application flow.

Looped in Engineering early for feasibility reviews, which helped us catch potential blockers before they became real problems.

Took feedback from those reviews and narrowed things down to two concepts everyone could get behind.

3ApprovalJun

Made the case to move from design into development, and got the redesign officially placed on the Q3 engineering roadmap.

Finalized the design specs and handed everything off to Engineering.

4DevelopmentAug–Sep

Worked closely with Engineering and Product to sort out solutions for some tricky edge cases.

Ran QA on the test environment to make sure the final build actually matched what we’d designed.

Results

We let it run a full month and pulled data from over 9,000 application starts — enough to feel genuinely confident in the final design. The project also became the reason a dedicated Growth Team exists today, spanning Design, Data, Engineering, Product, Marketing, and Operations.

0
Lift in top-of-funnel conversion
0
Statistical confidence
Learnings
  • Modernizing the funnel meant keeping it continuous with the rest of the application
  • Reaching for the design system first meant fewer one-off components to maintain
  • Staying close with Engineering meant less development time lost to ambiguity

Operation Apps Design System

Shipped
Project timeline — 2024–2025
AuditNov–Dec
DesignJan
AlignmentMar
DevelopmentMay–Aug

Goal & business impact

Our internal applications had each been built separately over time, so they didn’t feel like part of the same product. The goal was to bring them into one cohesive system, especially since we were about to start offering them together as a suite — and to stop Design and Engineering from rebuilding the same components across different apps.

Team

Engineering, Customer Operations, and Product — figuring out the right approach to unify all four applications.

Approach

I collaborated with our systems designer on unified components — navigation, tables, dashboards, and filters — that flex across Portfolio Manager, Lead Portal, CSP, and the rest of the suite. A table that works for loan data needed to work just as well for originator performance, so a lot of the work was getting that flexibility right without losing the shared look and feel.

Key constraints & insights

  • Design constraint. We couldn’t redesign all four applications at once, so the work happened in phases, alongside each product team’s existing priorities.
  • Actionable insight. Auditing the applications turned up a surprising amount of content that wasn’t even being used anymore — stripping it out first made unifying everything much easier.
Unified design system screens across Portfolio Manager, Lead Portal, and CSP applications, showing shared navigation, tables, and filters
My role through the project — 2024–2025
1AuditNov–Dec

Went through each application to get a real sense of how it actually worked day to day.

Sat down with Product Designers and our Design System Designer to spot overlapping components and figure out where things differed and why.

2DesignJan

Designed the core shared components we’d need to bring the applications together.

Put together an initial Phase 1 concept for each product, including how users would actually move between them.

3AlignmentMar

Reviewed the Phase 1 designs for each application with the core team (Product, Customer Operations, Engineering) and worked through the major concerns that came up.

Walked the broader team through the universal changes, sized up the effort involved, and got Engineering leads assigned to each piece.

4DevelopmentMay–Aug

Worked with the Engineering Lead and our Design System Designer to get global navigation components added into the library.

Ran QA on the test environment to make sure Phase 1 actually held up the way we’d designed it across every product.

Results

Design and Engineering stopped duplicating work, and conversations shifted from pixel-level details to how each product fits into the larger suite. Users stopped bouncing between four differently-feeling tools — it’s one system now, and it feels like it.

0
Reduction in duplicate build time
0 Components merged into one shared library

Building & Managing the Figure Design Team

Leadership

Overview

I joined Figure as its first designer, when the whole company was 8 people. There was no design team, no process, nothing to build on. Over the next few years I grew that into a 15-person team covering both Product and Marketing — big enough to support Figure’s entire suite of products.

1Experienced hyper growth

Joined in 2017 when the company had 8 employees, working out of the founders’ house. By 2022 we’d grown to 500+ people across 8 offices.

2Created team culture

Set up yearly team trips and Figcon visits, weekly syncs so everyone knew what everyone else was working on, and quarterly creative workshops.

3Established the design org

Grew the team from just me to 15 people capable of building multiple products from 0 to 1 — plus Marketing content like commercials, motion graphics, and direct mail.

4Company-wide integration

Built relationships across Figure by traveling to different offices for face time, and worked directly with Engineering across every product.

The Figure design team together at a team outing
Results
0 Person design team, spanning Product & Marketing
0
Employees at peak growth
0 Offices across the company
0 Years leading the team
Okay, fine, here’s the actual Strava content

Highlights on the bike

Ricky riding with his dog on his shoulders during an afternoon ride in Portland, ORView on Strava

Afternoon Ride

Portland, OR 9.4 mi · 115 ft gain
Route map for Oregon Trail Stage 4 near Diamond Peak Wilderness, ORView on Strava

Oregon Trail Stage 4

Lane County, OR 83.7 mi · 10,758 ft gain
Gravel bike leaning against a mural-painted wall in Girona, Spain, during The Traka 200View on Strava

The Traka 200

Girona, Spain 123.5 mi · 6,371 ft gain
A clear river running through the forest near Vancouver, CanadaView on Strava

Poco Lasso

Vancouver, Canada 49.9 mi · 2,579 ft gain
Mt. Hood reflected in a lake near Government Camp, ORView on Strava

Morning Ride

Mt. Hood, OR 47.7 mi · 4,610 ft gain
Riding a gravel road through the Icelandic highlands during The Rift 140kView on Strava

The Rift 140k

Iceland 84.4 mi · 5,105 ft gain
Mountain bike resting on a trail in Calheta, MadeiraView on Strava

Morning MTB Ride

Calheta, Madeira 8.5 mi · 2,799 ft gain
Canyon and river vista overlooking the Deschutes National Forest, ORView on Strava

Rough Route but great vibes

Deschutes National Forest, OR 53.2 mi · 4,938 ft gain
Kudos logged — opening your email…