← Michael Histen: UX & Product Design Leader

Case Study: Designing BondLink’s Fintech SaaS Platform

Deliverables

As Head of Design at BondLink, I led UX across the company’s entire fintech SaaS platform supporting municipal bond issuers, investors, and advisors. I established the company’s brand guidelines and designed both the corporate website and the full product suite.

This included a flexible template system used across hundreds of issuer websites, along with dashboards and tools for investor analytics, municipal market data and yield indexes, engagement tracking for bonds and email campaigns, and debt portfolio management and forecasting. I also designed investor workflow tools such as bookmarking issuers and bonds and building custom issuance calendars.

I built BondLink’s design library in Figma, including variables for typography, spacing, and color, as well as variant-based components that supported multiple product contexts. I partnered with roughly a dozen engineers to translate these into production-ready UI patterns that became the foundation for all new features and platform enhancements. This system helped shift launches from months to weeks.

I also ensured the platform met WCAG AA accessibility standards and ran color-blindness simulations to improve usability across a wider range of users.

During my time there, these improvements contributed to a 6x increase in platform usage and a 123% increase in investor participation.

View my full guide for how to build a scalable design system

Problem

BondLink was an early-stage startup when I joined, and most of the existing product had been assembled by engineers without a formal design system or clear UX direction. The company needed a consistent product framework, a recognizable brand identity, and a scalable way to expand the platform as it introduced new tools for issuers and investors.

Because the platform supported municipal bond issuance workflows representing more than $100B in activity, clarity and trust in the interface were critical to adoption. Because BondLink was a SaaS platform competing in a specialized and relationship-driven market, the success of the product depended largely on the strength of its user experience. A central responsibility of my role was establishing that foundation and helping position BondLink as a leader in the government technology space through industry-leading UX and product design.

Approach

I began by redesigning the corporate website to establish a clear visual identity and shared design foundation for the company. From there, I led the redesign of the SaaS platform itself, starting with a flexible issuer-site template system used across hundreds of customer deployments.

To shape the product direction, I interviewed issuers, investors, and advisors to understand how they managed disclosure, communication, and investor engagement during bond offerings. Because the municipal market is small and specialized, I also worked closely with internal subject-matter experts across sales and customer success to supplement direct research.

I partnered closely with the Director of Product to help define scope and prioritization for new features, and I worked cross-functionally with engineering, marketing, sales, customer success, and company leadership including the CEO and CTO to expand the platform into new workflow areas such as engagement tracking, portfolio monitoring, market data visualization, and investor planning tools.

I also hired and mentored a product designer who supported ongoing platform development as the system expanded.

Challenges

Municipal finance is a highly specialized domain with a relatively small user base, which made traditional large-scale usability testing difficult. Instead, we relied on targeted conversations with customers and close collaboration with internal teams who worked directly with issuers and investors every day.

This created a tighter feedback loop between product decisions and real-world workflows. It not only improved the quality of the product, but also strengthened relationships with customers by giving them a clearer sense of ownership and investment in the platform as it evolved.

Insights & Takeaways

A strong design system made a major difference in how quickly we could ship new features. By defining reusable components early and working closely with engineering on implementation, we were able to move from months-long release cycles to launches measured in weeks.

Embedding directly with engineering reduced friction across the design process and helped keep product decisions aligned with implementation realities.

Finally, maintaining close relationships with customers created a mutually reinforcing cycle: direct feedback improved the product, and involving customers in shaping the platform increased their engagement and long-term investment in its success.

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