Xendit (YC S15) · Payments onboarding
From 30 days to 14: rebuilding trust at sign-up.
Context
As Xendit — Indonesia's first B2B unicorn — entered hyper-growth, sign-up volume climbed faster than the teams onboarding those merchants could keep up with. Every day a new merchant wasn't live was a day Xendit earned no transaction revenue from them. Slow onboarding wasn't a UX nicety; it was a direct revenue constraint and a competitive vulnerability in a market where speed-to-value is the differentiator.
The challenge
The mandate was to get sign-up-to-live under 30 days — without adding headcount. But no single team could see the whole journey. Sales, Legal, Product and Engineering each owned a slice, and every department quietly assumed the bottleneck lived in someone else's slice.
What I did
I started by making the invisible visible. I ran a cross-functional workshop with the heads of Inbound Sales, Outbound Sales, Legal, Product and Engineering, and facilitated a process-mapping exercise that documented the end-to-end flow for the first time. Mapped together, the truth was clear: the delays were systemic — built into the handoffs themselves — not the fault of any one team. Manual handoffs, no SLAs per step, unclear ownership at transitions, legal sign-off as a chokepoint, and wet signatures all compounded.
My team then worked department by department, through interviews and co-creation, to design the product experiences the new process needed: a pre-live merchant dashboard with real-time status at every step; contextual automated emails at each milestone to cut status-chasing support tickets; digital multi-signatory contract signing that removed the legal bottleneck and made onboarding fully remote; and an internal admin dashboard so teams could track the pipeline and request missing information directly.
How I led
This was one initiative spanning research, process design, product design and delivery coordination across five departments. The leadership work was as much about getting five function heads to see one shared picture as it was about the interface — the mechanism behind the result was design-led operational transformation, not a technical fix.
Outcome
Once shipped, the redesigned process reached go-live in 14 days — twice as fast as the 30-day target. This is the project behind the 50% time-to-market reduction referenced across my profile.
What it proves
Hand me a growth constraint that looks like an engineering problem, and I'll find the systemic bottleneck across teams and rebuild the process around the customer — delivering a hard revenue outcome without more headcount.