Charles Schwab & Co.
INVESTING THEMES 0→1 PRODUCT
Schwab was launching it's first values-based investing product reaching both Gen Z and Baby Boomer investors. I led the Product Design team to deliver —from concept through launch—a high-impact, trusted trading experience allowing traders to explore and buy bundles of curated “themes,” built on novel IP under aggressive timelines.
Scope of work
Product Design
Phased Release Planning
Feature Concepts
High Visibility
Results
65,800 trades completed in first 4 months
Key Callouts
Worked in Dual Track Agile: Delivered immediate wins for dev and release, while in tandem building longer term product vision.
Role
Experience Design Director
Date
Sept 2020 - March 2022
Team
120+ team mates & stakeholders
Cross-functional org spanning marketing, strategy, product, engineering, data, UX
Problem
While the business pushed for speed to market, the underlying systems, workflows, and organizational alignment weren’t ready to support the complexity of basket trading—or the clarity investors expected from Schwab. Our team faced an emerging product full of unknowns, unanticipated requirements, and high pressure around deadlines.
Three big challenges
High leadership visibility meant any misstep would cascade: tight alignment required from VP up to CEO.
No prior experience with fractional “theme baskets” at Schwab: risk of trade failures, misunderstanding by users, legal/regulatory exposure.
Dozens of teams across product, design, engineering, and marketing each had a partial view of the problem, with no shared architecture or story connecting the pieces.
The Approach
MAP OUT THE ARCHITECTURE
01/ Building Schwab’s first values-based investing product required tight communication across dozens of teams, systems, and priorities. My role was to connect all of it—vision, people, and process—so we could move from a big idea to a stable, trusted experience that investors actually loved.
02/ The business challenge was speed: leadership wanted to reach market quickly. The design challenge was durability—how to deliver at pace without creating an experience that would buckle under tech debt.
03/ To solve this, we worked on two tracks in parallel: the team delivered visible wins to meet milestones, while I protected time and focus for long-term experience architecture. We mapped every moment of the investor journey—from discovery through trade completion and post-trade reflection—to understand exactly what the underlying systems needed to support.
04/ That mapping surfaced a critical truth: Schwab’s existing trading infrastructure couldn’t fully support the kind of basket trading our product required. The architecture gap became a turning point for the program. By visualizing dependencies and failure points, I helped engineering and product leadership see the scale of the issue early enough to plan for phased delivery instead of reactive fixes.
BRIDGING THE GAP
01/ Meanwhile, we tackled a second major problem: bridging the gap between legacy trading behaviors and a more intuitive, modern investing flow. Schwab’s trade experience was built for single, linear transactions—great for one-off trades, but not for the dynamic, percentage-based “theme baskets” this product introduced.
02/ To help investors understand and trust this new way of buying, we designed an exploratory experience modeled on familiar e-commerce interactions.
03/ Investors could browse themes, learn what they contained, and purchase with the same ease as checking out on Amazon—but with the depth and credibility of Schwab’s trading backbone.
ALIGNMENT BEYOND PRODUCT
01/ Finally, I focused on alignment beyond product. Marketing and product teams were telling two different stories about what “Investing Themes” was. I invited marketing partners into our research sessions and design reviews so they could hear client reactions firsthand. The result was a unified message—clear, trustworthy, and grounded in user understanding—that carried seamlessly from Schwab.com through the trading interface, tutorials, marketing materials and how our advisors spoke of it.
02/ The collaboration paid off. Marketing led with clarity about value and transparency about cost; design delivered a flow that felt both modern and familiar. Together, they created one of Schwab’s simplest, most trusted buying experiences—an experience clients described as “simple” and “like buying on Amazon,” even for something as complex as thematic investing.
Tight deadlines forced design and development to work side by side
01/ The pace was relentless. Design and development worked elbow-to-elbow—often finishing each other’s work to meet deadlines. This led to technical rework when initial designs or quick fixes failed usability testing. I helped ease leadership frustration and manage tech backlog by presenting clear participant data and demonstrating the ROI of each change.
02/ Tight collaboration is powerful—but only when paired with buffer and reflection. Allowing time for rework, regardless of discipline, keeps momentum sustainable and goals achievable.
Results
65,800 trades completed in first 4 months
Behavioral Science Insight: Reduce Cognitive Load
We reduced cognitive load by designing a simpler, more intuitive shopping experience. Knowing that investors in Themes were less “trader-savvy,” we used familiar e-commerce patterns to make buying feel clear and approachable. This ensured users understood limitations, maintained confidence, and trusted the process from start to finish.
IMPACT
01/ Schwab Investing Themes exceeded every expectation. Within two years, it grew to $2.7 billion in Assets Under Management and continued to expand with 20% year-over-year growth—proof that investors connected deeply with the product’s concept and experience.
02/ Beyond launch metrics, the product established a new model for how Schwab could design, validate, and scale first-of-their-kind offerings.
Through deep collaboration with leadership, my team identified 10 additional opportunities for optimization and innovation, giving executives clear cost–impact data to inform the next wave of investment.
“This experience is just like buying on Amazon. I love it, so easy.” - Participant 21
Elevating Design Maturity & Team Efficiency
01/ After the MVP shipped, I led the team in strengthening our foundations—ensuring our methods could scale and sustain quality long after launch.
02/ I introduced a new process for how product requirements flowed into design. Previously, requests arrived fragmented and ambiguous, creating friction across teams.
The new intake and review structure reduced post-sprint UI fixes by 80% and cut cross-functional communication time in half.
These changes gave teams more clarity, faster momentum, and higher confidence in delivery—turning what had been tension points into one of the most collaborative and efficient workflows in the org.
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