Mission

My mission was to bring systems-level clarity to a merchant support experience that had grown fragmented across teams, tools, and touchpoints. Rather than solving isolated pain points, I set out to understand how merchants, internal policy teams, and product teams all interacted with the same underlying issues, so the business could fix root causes instead of symptoms and reduce both churn and repeat support volume.

Business outcomes

This work delivered the company’s first end-to-end audit of the merchant support experience, giving leadership a single, prioritized view of issues that had previously lived in separate team backlogs. The audit fed directly into a strategic roadmap presented to Product and Engineering leadership, and it became the foundation for executive planning and business cases tied to reducing merchant churn and downstream support costs.

AI

I researched agentic AI opportunities specifically for merchant support, looking at where automation could reduce repetitive support work without eroding merchant trust. Using Figma Make, I rapidly prototyped several AI-assisted workflow concepts, which let teams see and react to tangible interaction models rather than abstract proposals, accelerating conversations about where automation made sense and where human judgment still mattered most.

Interviews

I designed and led a research effort built on one-on-one interviews with 75 small business owners, alongside internal stakeholders across policy, product, and support teams. Building trust was central to this process. Because merchants often hesitated to share operational or financial pain points candidly, I focused early conversations on establishing credibility and confidentiality, which made it possible to surface real, sometimes uncomfortable, operational needs rather than surface-level complaints.

Research

I translated interview findings into structured artifacts that different audiences could act on: high-fidelity service blueprints that mapped the merchant journey against internal systems and handoffs, ecosystem maps showing how merchants, policy, and product teams intersected, and journey maps highlighting where experience broke down. I also wrote up individual merchant case studies to preserve the human context behind the data, and consolidated recurring themes into a single issue-prioritization framework that leadership could use for planning.

Outcomes

The research and blueprints surfaced new product and service opportunities that had not previously been visible to any single team, because the pain points had been scattered across disconnected backlogs. This work directly informed the prioritized strategic roadmap shared with Product and Engineering leadership, and it gave the business a repeatable framework for evaluating merchant experience issues going forward, something that did not exist before this project.