Trovy: From designer to design engineer

How I went from handing engineering Figma files to shipping production code at a fintech startup.

Role
Founding Designer
Industry
Fintech · Home equity
Designs circa
2025–2026
Employment type
Full-time
Built with
HTML/CSS/JS, AI coding agents [+ stack]
The redesigned Trovy homepage: ‘Let your home take you higher’, a house carried by balloons

Trovy: From designer to design engineer

How I went from handing engineering Figma files to shipping production code at a fintech startup.

Role
Founding Designer
Industry
Fintech · Home equity
Designs circa
2025–2026
Employment type
Full-time
Built with
HTML/CSS/JS, AI coding agents [+ stack]

Your home equity, in your wallet.™

A HELOC is one of the cheapest ways to borrow, but it usually means weeks of paperwork and a draw request every time you need money. Trovy is a fully online HELOC, $25k to $250k, with the line on a card: swipe it, move cash to your bank, or lock a balance into a fixed-rate FixedPay plan. Approval in as little as 4 minutes, funding in as few as 4 business days.

I joined as the founding designer and shipped the brand, the card, the application, the account dashboard, the marketing site and the ads.

Preapproved in 2 minutes

Trovy went from 0–100MM PMV in one year of operation, from relentlessly alleviating friction in the application flow.

Live prototype · tap through it

Project 1

Ideate in Figma, polish in code.

A designer’s superpower is the ability to describe visual ideas succinctly that humans innately understand. I always start in Figma, but 80% of my time is spent tweaking and reacting in Claude Code.

Open the build full size ↗
trovy.com

Live build · scroll inside the frame

What I’ve learned so far about design engineering

I was onboarded into the engineering team over the summer of 2026. I started small, playing with marketing concepts and pitching small interaction changes in the product. Now, after getting Renovate with Trovy out in one week, I have a few things I’ve learned.

Design input makes the difference.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Say less, and send a Figma link.

Sweat the small stuff?

I used to sweat it in Figma, now I sweat it in code. Figma gives direction, code gives it clarity.

Source of truth is the kicker.

Is it Figma? Is it code? Is it somewhere else? This has been the main friction point.

Project 2

Renovate with Trovy

Renovation is the biggest reason homeowners tap their equity, and the point where they are least sure what they want, what it costs and whom to hire.

Renovate, part of Trovy’s Homeowner Toolkit, takes a homeowner from a photo of a room to an AI-generated plan, a rendered design, a cost estimate and a shopping list, with the Trovy line as the way to pay for it.

It is live for cardholders behind a release flag. The redesign on these slides is in review.

Renovate on desktop: a before/after slider over a bathroom redesign, a column of saved versions, Renault’s chat and a $24,900 estimate next to Take Out Cash

See the renovation of your dreams in minutes.

  1. 1Start with your room

    Add a photo and say what should change.

  2. 2Plan it with Renault

    A few quick questions: scope, style, budget.

  3. 3Approve the plan

    Renault writes a project plan. Edit it or generate now.

  4. 4See your new room

    Drawn on your own photo, with a before/after slider.

  5. 5Price it and shop it

    Materials and labor, each product pinned and linked.

How it was built

Figma first, then code

Direction and key screens start in Figma. Layouts, states and motion get refined in the running app with Claude Code.

Desktop and mobile together

Every change was checked at 1440 and 390 in the same pass, so neither size is a port of the other.

A visual-QA rig

A test setup with a sample bathroom project renders every screen at both sizes after each change. The screenshots on this page come from it.

Behind a release flag

Shipped to cardholders behind a flag, so Trovy controls rollout, and the redesign goes through review before it reaches everyone.

My process

  1. Design

    Figma

    Layouts, type and the key screens start here.

  2. Build

    Claude Code

    I move into code early, working in VS Code, the Claude Code app and Claude in the terminal. Most design decisions after that get made in the running build.

  3. Assets

    ChatGPT and Gemini

    Where the photo and video assets come from.

VS Code with Claude Code open on the Trovy frontend: the Homeowner Toolkit chat beside a Renovate visual-QA screenshot of Renault asking for a photo of the kitchen
Claude Code in VS Code, on the Renovate visual-QA captures

What changed in how I work

The prototype is the spec.

Engineering reviews a build. Fewer handoff questions, and the edge cases are already in the code.

Motion gets designed where it runs.

Scroll timelines and transitions were tuned in the browser, not described on a slide.

The queue is gone.

Marketing and Toolkit work no longer waits for engineering time. The lending product still does, and that is the right split.

1 / 1 ← → or space
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