Case Study: Redefining SuperFi's Design Strategy to Drive Engagement & Retention
Background
SuperFi originally positioned itself as a debt prevention and bill management app, helping users avoid falling behind on payments. However, our message of debt avoidance failed to connect with our core user base. We found that people already struggling with debt were often disengaged from their finances—seeing constant reminders of their debt only compounded feelings of stress and avoidance.
This resulted in low monthly active usage (15% MAU), declining user retention, and limited revenue. Our home screen made this worse by surfacing how much debt users were in and how long it would take to repay, turning each interaction into a reminder of financial anxiety.
With rising costs across the UK, the need to support at-risk customers was more urgent than ever—not only for users but also for bill providers and lenders facing increased defaults. We needed to rethink our strategy from the ground up.
My Role
As the Head of Product Design, overseeing a large team of product designers and researchers embedded in cross-functional squads focused on retention and revenue, I led the design strategy work. The design strategy focussed on the wider company OKR, to reverse the decline in engagement while creating a scalable model for growth and retention. Alongside my peers in product, I worked to create a design strategy that would empower the product team to improve retention data points. .
I took on both product design and research responsibilities, leading the team through a process of reframing our user problem, testing new value propositions, and ultimately driving a pivot in SuperFi’s positioning and product experience.
Our product was positioned primarily around debt prevention—helping users avoid falling behind on bills and manage existing debt. While this made logical sense from a problem-solution perspective, our user research highlighted a significant emotional and behavioural disconnect.
Through a combination of qualitative interviews, app usage data analysis, surveys, and in-app feedback loops, I led an effort to deeply understand our users’ motivations, anxieties, and existing coping strategies. Our key audience segment, whom we referred to as ‘Strugglers’, were individuals with under £500 in savings, often living paycheque to paycheque and highly susceptible to financial shocks. These users didn’t want more reminders of their financial vulnerability. The app’s debt-centric experience—highlighting debt totals and repayment timelines upfront—was triggering avoidance behaviours and driving disengagement.
Alongside the user insights, I conducted a market analysis, reviewing emerging trends in personal finance apps, fintech propositions, and behavioural finance interventions. We also reviewed competitors like Monzo, who had successfully reframed regulatory friction points (like payment delays) as fraud prevention features, offering us a lesson in reframing perceived negatives into user-centric benefits.
Defining the Product Vision and Goals
The research made it clear that our existing product vision was mismatched to both user needs and the market opportunity. Working cross-functionally with product management and business stakeholders, I facilitated a series of visioning workshops to co-create a new, more aspirational product vision:
“To empower our users to stay financially resilient, by rewarding positive financial behaviours and helping them build a safety net—while keeping our presence light and supportive, not overwhelming.”
This reframing also realigned our business goals, shifting from a narrow focus on debt reduction to broader metrics such as improving monthly active users, increasing engagement frequency, and driving revenue through bill payment rewards and partnerships. We defined clear KPIs, including increasing MAU by 20%, reducing early churn by 30%, and increasing the average number of interactions per user per month.
These insights shaped a revised product roadmap, focusing on building proactive features that rewarded users for staying on top of bills and provided nudges towards financial resilience, rather than only reacting to debt crises.
Identifying Key Features and User Flows
From the roadmap, I led the feature prioritisation process using the RICE framework, ensuring features were assessed against reach, impact, confidence, and effort. Key initiatives included:
A bill payment reward system offering tangible incentives for on-time payments.
Savings buffer progress tracking, helping users see positive growth rather than debt reminders.
Proactive nudges and tips to reduce expenses, designed as lightweight moments of support rather than heavy-handed alerts.
To ensure these features felt seamless and supportive, I facilitated collaborative user journey mapping sessions, redesigning key user flows to transition from reactive debt management to proactive financial empowerment. The new flows focused on positive reinforcement, progress visibility, and subtle nudges rather than urgent warnings.
Embedding Strategy into the Wider Organisation
To embed this repositioning deeply, I created a design strategy playbook, which articulated our user insights, JTBD statements, design principles, and new proposition narrative. I ran alignment sessions with leadership, product, engineering, marketing, and customer service teams, ensuring that the new strategy cascaded into lifecycle comms, partnerships, and beyond.
This strategic design work helped reposition SuperFi from a debt-focused utility app to an engaging, reward-based financial support platform—ultimately supporting both customer outcomes and our business model.
Summary
This project reinforced my belief that design strategy is not about aesthetic improvements, but about reframing the entire problem space and enabling cross-functional teams to think differently. By combining user research, market insight, behavioural science, and iterative design methods, we were able to turn a disengaging, problem-framed product into one that celebrated progress and drove meaningful engagement.