Stella Mbaka
Stella Mbaka
Design leader shaping strategy, systems, teams, and digital experiences.
Toronto, Ontario
Hello, I’m Stella. I’m a design leader with almost 20 years of experience across digital product delivery.
Over the past 7 years at RBC, I’ve helped shape multi-year mobile and web strategies and led work across digital investing, payments, security, AVION rewards, metrics, the HSBC acquisition and banking for youth.
Brands I've worked for:
Selected work
Standardizing UX metrics measurement
RBC Digital Design Org
I led a multidisciplinary design working group to establish and adopt a common approach for evaluating experiences across journeys and teams, supported by a reusable measurement practices.
Coming soon.
Shaping Payments &
AVION Rewards Strategy
RBC Mobile App
I helped shape the next evolution of payments capabilities & AVION rewards integration by defining a more intent-led experience model aligning partners around future-state experiences, and connecting multiple journeys around where design could have the greatest impact.
Coming soon.
Improving How Teams Work in a Regulated Environment
RBC Invesment Mega Journey
How I helped create clearer collaboration models and working practices across Design, Product, Technology, Business, Legal, and Compliance bringing design earlier into strategy, discovery, prioritization, and decision-making.
Coming soon.
Scaling Consistency Through Design Systems
RBC Invesment Mega Journey
I helped strengthen the adoption and evolution of shared design foundations, aligning teams around reusable patterns, improving consistency across experiences, and creating clearer ways to scale design decisions across products.
Coming soon.
Leadership Philosophy
My goal is to create stronger partnerships, better decisions, stronger teams, and experiences that create meaningful value for both customers and the business.
I believe great design leadership is less about having all the answers and more about creating the conditions for the right answers to emerge.
That means bringing clarity to complexity, asking the right questions, connecting perspectives across disciplines, and helping teams understand not only what they are building, but why it matters and how success will be measured.
I also see design advocacy as part of the role. It’s not only about helping others understand the value of design, but about understanding the world our partners operate in, their pressures, constraints, and goals so we can meet them where they are and work together more effectively.