Two products, one designer, and the pipeline that made it possible

Two jobs, one designer, no spare capacity

Samuel Kripto Indonesia is a regulated Indonesian crypto exchange. Around 1,000 monthly active users — small, but every screen moves real money under real regulatory supervision. A confusing withdrawal isn’t a bounce. It’s a support ticket, a compliance question, or someone’s savings in the wrong place.

The design team was four: one on backoffice, one on web, one on graphic design, and me on mobile. Twenty engineers. Which meant mobile had exactly one designer, and mobile had two jobs running at once.

Keep v1 healthy — a live product absorbing a constant stream of stakeholder requests, legal requirements, and regulatory change, most of it arriving as pressure for more fields, more steps, more disclosure. Someone had to sit between those demands and the user.

Design v2 from zero — new information architecture, new visual system, light and dark, built to survive being handed to twenty engineers.

Doing both at a normal pace wasn’t arithmetically possible. That constraint produced everything else in this case study.