Ilana Bonder is a Product Designer at Meta. Born in Brazil, based in Brooklyn. Previously at Valon, Swimm, Digitas, NYC Media Lab, Google, and NYU.

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About

Lately, I’ve been exploring how AI and automation can simplify complex workflows while creating more seamless, human-centered experiences at scale. I’m excited about designing systems that not only reduce friction but also anticipate user needs, adapt intelligently, and build trust—whether in operational tools or everyday consumer products.

What drives my work is a genuine curiosity about people and a spirit of playful experimentation with technology.

Valon
June 2021 - May 2025

Led design for three teams: Data, Investor, and Finance. I help build critical internal and enterprise tools that support data governance, loan transfers, operational workflows, and compliance-heavy processes. These tools power Valon’s mortgage servicing platform, which manages a $70B loan portfolio and serves 400K+ homeowners.

When I joined Valon in 2021 the company served only 500 pilot loans. I was responsible for leading design for the Payments team, and as we scaled, also the Delinquency vertical - both for enterprise and customer facing parts of the product. Some of my contributions:

Designed several key features that reduced operational servicing costs from $6 to $3 per loan while maintaining a 90% CSAT (industry average: 70%).
Drove UX strategy for delinquency management, enabling operations teams to support 5x loan ramp efficiently.
Built payments and financial workflows that handle 300K+ monthly homeowners transactions across five different payment methods.

I partner with product, engineering, and operations, along with collaborating with the Head of Design to shape our team’s strategy, culture and processes. I actively help grow the product and design teams through mentoring and recruiting, while championing and expanding our design system.

Swimm
Jan 2020 - June 2021

As one of the first employees at Swimm, I played a key role in the product vision and UX strategy from seed stage to Series B. I collaborated with engineering and product teams, working closely with the CPO to create the base for an AI-powered code documentation experience, making it easier for developers to onboard and maintain codebase knowledge.

Key Achievements:

Drove a 5× increase in content creation by designing an intuitive workflow for generating, linking, and updating documentation within developer environments.
Increased Monthly Active Users by 2x through iterative improvements in onboarding, engagement loops, and frictionless integration with Git-based workflows.
Created Swimm’s design system, with custom developer centered components, that ensured consistency across the platform and enabled scalability.

At Swimm, I learned firsthand how to scale a product from early traction to rapid growth, balancing UX clarity with the complexity of developer tools. As a design manager, I recruited and managed a small design team .

Learn more about my previous experience at Digitas, NYU and Google on LinkedIn

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