Shaping a clear product north star for the Zip Australia app as it evolved beyond payments into a longer-term financial relationship. Rather than prescribing a single fixed roadmap, this project established a shared product vision, principles, and future-facing frameworks to guide decision-making over time.
The initiative aligned cross-functional teams around a unifying theme: 'the most human fintech in the world' and created tangible design artefacts to make strategy understandable, memorable, and actionable across the entire organization.
Zip Australia's product strategy was maturing, but it lacked a concrete, shared expression of the product.
As Zip Australia's customer value proposition was being refreshed in late 2022, a growing need for alignment between strategic intent and day-to-day product delivery was emerging. Strategic direction was well understood by leadership, but remained abstract, hard to internalise, explain, or consistently apply for too many teams.
Key challenges at the time included:
Inconsistent understanding of core customer segments (e.g. transactors vs revolvers).
A focus on squad-level optimisations without a clear end-to-end view.
A payments-first mental model that constrained broader thinking about customer repayment well-being.
Difficulty explaining where Zip was going to new or non-product stakeholders.
The organization needed way to align on an opinionated, tangible view of the future, and not just possible ideas of it.
A design-led north star project created the opportunity to:
Align teams without locking them into a rigid roadmap.
Make strategy tangible and repeatable across the organisation.
Establish a shared language for evaluating product ideas.
Shift Zip’s perceived role from 'how to pay' to 'how to manage repayments'.
At a business level, this work aimed to unlock more coherent product bets and support Zip’s evolution toward deeper, longer-term customer relationships.
The project operated under several constraints:
The vision needed to apply across multiple squads and time horizons.
Outputs had to resonate with both leadership and delivery teams.
Being team-agnostic, no single roadmap or feature set could be mandated.
The work needed to stand independently of current team structures.
Constraints shaped the core approach to the project, which was to create something concrete enough to guide decisions, but flexible enough to remain relevant as priorities evolved.
Workshops across the product org showed the need for both an overarching story and specific product visions.
Discovery took place through a series of cross-functional workshops involving product, design, engineering, and leadership. These sessions surfaced varied ideas on Zip's strategic goals, tensions across parts of the current app experience strategy, competing assumptions about Zip’s role in customers’ financial lives, and gaps in how customer segments were understood.
Workshops with senior leadership.
A key insight emerged:
Many teams were optimising different parts of the system because they lacked a shared picture of the whole.
To address this head-on, the project focused on capturing both: a clear, overarching framing of the product strategy as well as specific ideas that exemplified this strategy to help inform future product directions.
A single framing to unify the product org and specific ideas to show the application in different contexts.
The solution combined future-facing vision with practical guidance for teams to move forward. Rather than stopping at a conceptual end state, the work defined both where Zip was heading and how product decisions should be made along the way.
This took three forms:
1. A unifying product vision
The theme 'the most human fintech in the world,' emerged through the discovery workshops and in collaboration with brand and design teams. The vision reframed Zip’s role from a payment method to a longer-term money relationship and this was further distilled into three conceptual personas which encapsulated all of Zip's intended product offerings and strategic direction. The Zip Australia app would lean into one or more of these themes for different target audiences and help guide the grouping of feature-sets.
The development of three persona's helped capture and communicate Zip Australia's long-term strategy and vision.
2. App principles as the “how”
A set of app-level principles translated the vision into day-to-day decision-making guidance. These principles acted as lenses for evaluating ideas, helping teams assess whether work meaningfully moved the product closer to the north star or simply added surface-level functionality.
The intent was to give teams permission to say no to ideas that didn’t align, while enabling consistency without prescribing exact solutions.
North Star principles created a unifying lens across decisions on product strategy and delivery.
3. Concrete next steps to build momentum
To avoid the vision feeling abstract or distant, the work identified specific, near-term opportunities that could be delivered incrementally. These served as stepping stones toward the broader vision and created momentum without requiring a full-scale re-architecture of the app.
The project resulted in several directional wireframe concepts showcasing the principles and strategic direction in action.
Together, these three elements would allow teams to reason about both direction and execution, supporting phased delivery while keeping a coherent and memorable long-term view.
The North Star work both shifted the organisation from a payments-first to a repayments-first focus - leading to a restructuring of some app screens - and also persisted through business disruptions.
Following launch, the North Star work informed a shift in organizational thinking from payments-first to repayments-first.
One immediate tangible outcome was a shift in focus from payments to repayment health and management. The consolidation of disparate payment functions into a 'Pay tab' simplified discovery and clarified which payment methods were available per account type (e.g. subscriptions, barcode payments, PayPal integration etc.) creating space to place emphasis on customer's
This structural change allowed the home screen to evolve away from being a payments launchpad and toward a clearer focus on repayment visibility and management controls.
Shortly after the project launched, the business entered a necessary period of arrears damage control, temporarily deprioritizing broader app evolution. As conditions stabilized, elements of the north star were later revisited and reused, reinforcing the value of having a durable vision that could survive pauses and resets.
Conceptual framework for an evolving 'Pay tab' in the Zip app informed by the app North Star project.
Strong visions endure disruption when they focus on principles, not prescriptions.
This project reinforced that effective north stars are resilient when they define direction and decision-making frameworks, rather than fixed outcomes. While delivery momentum slowed during the arrears-focused period, the underlying principles and personas remained relevant and reusable when work resumed.
It also highlighted the importance of pairing vision with immediate, credible next steps. Without this, even strong strategic work risks feeling theoretical. Designing both the future and the path toward it proved critical for alignment and adoption.
Finally, the project reaffirmed design’s role as a strategic translation layer - making abstract strategy human, tangible, and actionable across an organisation, even through periods of change.
