Penfold

First hire.
Award-winning app.

2019, Penfold’s co-founders and I set out to build the UK’s best digital pension. Their pitch: “We want to make pensions sexy.” My answer: “Impossible. I’m in.” I set up the product, the system it shipped on, and made the call that changed who it was for.

#1first hire

1 weekfrom concept to live

6xsignups, on refocus

£4MAUM, first year

Founding Designer, first hire. Mobile and web, from proof of concept to a live pension. 2019/2020, London, onsite.

foundation

Live in a week. Then onboarding cut from 33 steps to 5.

Week one: the proof of concept became a live app, in time for the funding round. It shipped fast and ugly: 33 onboarding steps.
The first real users signed up, the round closed, and the focus turned to growth.
I cut onboarding to 5 independent modules, so users could pause and finish later without losing progress.

design system

I built one mobile-first component set that fed every platform.

Desktop and mobile components were nearly identical, so mobile became the single source of truth.
Engineering could iterate in isolation, and we shipped daily.
Feedback ran on a daily loop: session replays every morning, Customer Support tickets reviewed every Friday, fixes often shipped same-day.

We had optimized speed. Targeting was next, and it was strategy, not design. Penfold sold pensions to people without one: a huge market, and a slow one, because every signup needed educating first. People who already had a pension needed none. They just needed a better pension. Winning them was a product problem, and we were fast at product.

product strategy

Stop selling new pensions: combine existing ones.

The battleground changed: from educating users, to winning them on product.
The product rebuilt around combining pots people already had, instead of opening an empty one and waiting on a first contribution.
Signups rose from ~100 to ~600 a month, each arriving with an existing pot, so signup value rose with volume.

impact

Year one: 3,000 savers and £4M under management.

A dozen users in the first week grew to ~3,000 savers and £4M AUM by the end of year one, on plan.
The foundation still serves Penfold today: over £1B managed, voted Best Pension 2026.