Swoop · Head of Design · 2021 — 2022
Matching businesses to funding without the spreadsheet
Swoop matches SMEs with funding and savings opportunities. The design challenge was making a genuinely complex financial matching engine feel like a guided conversation.
Swoop matches SMEs to funding and savings products — loans, equity, grants, cost-saving switches — spanning six-plus product types with different eligibility logic. There was no dedicated design function yet, so every product had evolved its own patterns and its own version of the matching experience.
- Built the design function from zero: hired and mentored three designers, and set up the first shared design language across the product.
- Reframed the matching engine’s output as a guided conversation — a small number of qualifying questions surfaced relevant options — rather than a filterable results table.
- Unified six previously separate funding products behind one matching pattern, so adding a new product type meant configuring the pattern, not designing a new flow.
- Partnered directly with founders and engineering leads to keep design embedded in roadmap decisions from the earliest stage.
Swoop shipped a consistent matching experience across its funding and savings products with a design team and system built to support the next stage of product growth.
This write-up is illustrative — built to reflect the real scope and constraints of the role, with specifics anonymised or generalised. Get in touch for the detailed version.