Santander Portugal

Santander Portugal is the largest privately-owned retail bank in the country, serving millions of customers across its digital platforms — NetBanco (responsive web) and My Santander (native iOS and Android apps).

When I joined as UX Chapter Lead, the design function was six designers focused on logged-in account management for those two flagship products. It became clear quickly that the scope of my role would be much broader than the initial brief.

Some areas of the bank were healthy — the core digital products had a small but capable design team, NPS was trending upward in some surfaces, and product investment was real. Other areas were underserved. Internal tools were neglected. Marketing campaigns and mortgage contracting were being built without design input. Critical user journeys were stalling in delivery for years at a time.

The brief was to support the existing team. The actual work was to build a design practice big enough, deliberate enough, and durable enough to support the bank's full digital ambition.

I joined as UX Chapter Lead with six designers reporting through the structure. Over the next two and a half years, I built that into a 25-person multidisciplinary practice — adding researchers, UX writers, and DesignOps support — while staying hands-on as an IC on the work that needed senior craft directly.

This is the role that taught me the most about leading a team whose loyalty isn't structurally yours. The designers I led were drawn from five different external consultancies, including my own. None of them reported to me on paper. They reported to the consultancy that placed them, and I was a UX Chapter Lead, also external, leading them across organisational lines. Every decision I made about staffing, allocation, mentorship, or promotion was watched closely for signs of favouritism — including from my own consultancy.

What made the team work, in the end, was the discipline of being unmistakably fair. Clear practice. Consistent rituals. Visible reasoning. No designer ever needing to wonder whether their consultancy origin shaped their opportunities.

The team grew from 6 to 25 over roughly 9 months. The growth was structured rather than opportunistic — I escalated the urgent need for a cohesive design function to C-level and senior directors, made the strategic argument for the disciplines that were missing, and built the team to industry-proven ratios:

The result was a function that could support both customer-facing products and internal tools, with research and content embedded from the start of each engagement. It also created a real design community — mentorship rituals, shared standards, peer review practices — that made the team something designers wanted to be part of.

While I was building the practice, the global Santander design team was developing Flame — a shared design system intended for adoption across the group's markets eventually.

"Eventually" was the operative word. I saw an opportunity. If Santander Portugal became the first market to adopt Flame, I could reshape every in-progress project around reusable components and shared patterns — capturing the velocity benefit of the system before the bank's individual products had each made enough local design decisions to make adoption painful.

I made the case to international design leadership and to Portugal-side stakeholders, and Santander Portugal became Flame's pioneer market. The system was rolled into:

• The new mortgage contracting journey.
• Several internal tools.
• Santander's new corporate website — the first full experience built entirely on Flame.
• Every new project initiated from that point onwards.

The compounding effect was measurable. Projects using Flame shipped approximately 30% faster than projects built without it, and they shipped with consistent patterns, accessibility behaviour, and visual language across products that had previously felt like they came from different companies.

The tokens did the heavy lifting. The same auto-insurance flow — same components, same logic — could be rendered into Netbanco (still pre-Flame at the time, with its teal accent) and into the corporate website (already on Flame, in full red). One source of truth, two platform skins, while Flame was rolling out market by market.

This was the kind of decision that doesn't look like a leadership decision from the outside — it's invisible to anyone reading the org chart. But it was the single highest-leverage move I made at Santander. Every project the team shipped afterward benefited from a foundation I'd positioned them on, rather than negotiated around.

A practice of 25 designers can support a lot of work. But there were moments where the most strategically critical project still needed me hands-on — and one of those moments defined how I led at Santander.

A redesign of the digital account opening flow had been stuck for over twenty months, passed between multiple project managers, with each iteration making tech-first, user-last decisions. New digital account opening was how Santander Portugal acquired most of its new customers, and the September influx of university students opening accounts tied to their student ID issuance was the seasonal volume the bank planned its year around. Miss September, and the bank would lose an intake.

I took it on personally — not just as the designer, but as a PO / Design hybrid. I owned the product decisions alongside the design ones: scope, prioritisation, sequencing, the trade-offs between regulatory needs and what could realistically ship in a quarter. The team needed to see what "ship it" looked like under pressure, and the September deadline was the hard, public commitment that would force the political stalemate to break.

Heuristic evaluation of the existing attempts. Restart from scratch. Lean MVP scoped jointly with a newly assigned project manager — me owning the product framing, them owning the delivery mechanics. A four-month sprint to the deadline — moving through the structural decisions (auth flow, identity verification routes, OTP validation, document acceptance, contract information, ID photograph capture) one by one, with the visual system landing on each step in turn.

The contrast at the entry point tells the story. Before, the flow opened with two flat method buttons — no progress, no product context, no way for the user to anchor the decision they were about to make. After, the same step set the expectation up front: where am I in this, what am I opening, and what do I get with it?

The flow shipped in time. Students opened accounts on it as part of the seasonal intake the bank had been planning for years. A project stuck for twenty months shipped in four.

The broader point is the one that matters for how I run a design function. Leading 25 designers doesn't mean stepping away from the work. It means knowing which problems still need you — and being willing to step into the product seat when the design seat alone won't unblock them.

Across the engagement, I ran a structured mentorship practice — regular 1:1s, development plans, team rituals — that turned the team from a collection of consultants into a community. Mentorship extended beyond 1:1s into formal training delivery: internal sessions on heuristic evaluation methodology, accessibility in digital products, design system adoption, and shared tooling practices.

The signal that it worked is one I'm still proud of. Designers from those years still reach out for advice now, long after I left the bank and long after they moved on themselves.

“

I had the privilege of working with Nuno at the start of my UX career. He helped me building confidence and developing key critical thinking skills. Even now, Nuno remains a trusted mentor, offering advice and support whenever needed. I'm incredibly grateful for his impact on my career and highly recommend him as an inspiring UX leader.

— Adriana Marques · Designer, Santander Portugal

The mentorship outlasted the engagement. That was the test.

Santander taught me how to lead a team whose loyalty isn't structurally yours.

The 25 designers in the practice didn't report to me on paper. They reported to five different consultancies, including my own. Every staffing decision, every project allocation, every promotion conversation was watched for signs of favouritism — including, often most sharply, by the consultancy that had placed me.

What I learned was that fairness, at scale, has to be visible. Clarity of practice. Consistency of ritual. Transparency of reasoning. Never being seen to favour one consultancy over another, including my own. The team I built wasn't held together by reporting lines — it was held together by trust in the system I ran.

Increasingly, senior design roles look like this: matrixed teams, blended permanent and contractor staffing, designers whose loyalty sits with several different parties at once. Santander is where I learned how to lead that kind of team — and how to do it without losing the people, the work, or my own integrity in the process.