PayPal
One product, two problems: the portal itself — and the two-continent team building it.
I worked on PayPal’s developer demo portal — the destination that closed the gap between “here’s an API” and “my checkout works.” I owned its interaction and visual design, and I built the process that let an offshore design team and an onsite dev team finally work as one.
From “here’s a reference doc” to “my checkout works.”
The demo portal had to serve a deliberately wide audience at once — and the two ends of it wanted very different things:
Want real code and API detail — the exact gateway integration, ready to lift.
Non-technical, building DIY sites — they need it genuinely learnable, not just documented.
Two things had to be true — the product had to make PayPal’s gateways genuinely learnable, and the distributed team building it had to actually function.
A working demo store anyone could learn from — and take with them.
The central decision: anchor everything in a real, browseable demo e-commerce store — apparel, beauty, big-box — so every gateway concept had a concrete place to live. The constraint that made it concrete also made it extensible. Four moves carried it:
A browseable demo store
Real apparel, beauty, and big-box storefronts a visitor could actually shop.
Full checkout, everywhere
A complete checkout flow across locales and devices — not a screenshot of one.
Merchant / Developer toggle
One view flips between the shopper’s experience and the code behind it, with inline best-practice callouts.
A Get Code action
Handed over the exact snippet — so learning turned straight into something you could take with you.
The full story — the demo-store model, the view toggle, Get Code, and the reusability insight:
Read more about the Demo PortalFixing a broken handoff between two continents.
The design team was burning at ~200% of budgeted hours and quietly falling apart — an offshore design team in India, an onsite dev team in the US, a ~12-hour gap, and no one stateside speaking for the offshore team’s capacity. The root cause wasn’t skill or effort; it was that no one was authorized to say “no.” I built the cadence — and became the voice — that fixed it.
The full story — the three audits, the daily cross-timezone cadence, and the burn rate falling from 200% to ~110%:
Read more about the Design ProcessA product is only as good as the team that can ship it — so I designed both.
The demo portal made PayPal’s gateways learnable; the process work made the team that built it sustainable. The same engagement, from two very different angles.