commerce workflow

When I joined the project, the team was caught in an infinite loop of iterations. They were struggling to reconcile the ambitious vision laid out by the design strategist with the ground reality of technical platform constraints. Engineering was waiting for hand-offs that never materialized.

My objective was to ground the design—honoring the strategic vision while remaining realistic about technical limitations. The main challenge? I had exactly two sprints to hit the ground running, untangle the process, and deliver an engineering-ready design.

To get onboard and kickstart my engagement, I conducted several 1:1s with the business lead, design strategist, and the design team to understand the vision, objectives, and progress to date. Recognizing that the team had missed a milestone and there wasn't a recovery plan in place, I moved to mitigate the risk. To restore momentum, we established a two-sprint timeline and worked backward to create a structured action plan, defining clear deliverables and checkpoints to track our progress.

Business had already built a massive repo documenting journey maps, process flows and market research. Given the aggressive timelines, I leveraged AI to synthesize the data to insights to inform my design direction. Parallelly, I had 1:1s with the product architect to understand the current platform, its limitations and any potential blockers.

The design team had already explored and iterated on lot of ideas on how the workflows will be triggered, tracked, and actioned. The only challenge was in breaking the mold of legacy platform. The design tenets outlined by the domain design strategist required the application to be built as a modern, minimal and action oriented platform but the underlying SaaS product sat at the very opposite end of that spectrum. To solve this challenge, we dissected the platform to get to its basic layers and redesigned it ground up, conforming to the design tenets.

After rapid prototyping and iterating through multiple variations using Figma and 'Figma Make', we zeroed in on a Single-Page Application (SPA) solution, which gave us control on the user experience without making significant changes to the platform architecture. This would allow us to embed the workflow components (built as MFE's) in any commerce tool where workflow had to be integrated. However, this solution presented another challenge since we were incurring a large number of API calls and would hit the limits based on projected usage. We refined the design to optimize the information to minimize separate API calls and engineering built a caching layer to limit the API calls; these actions brought down the projected usage to manageable levels leaving some headroom to spare.

We presented the direction, along with next steps and secured a buy in from the stakeholders. To get engineering started, I worked with the PO to build the backlog for the MVP and establish a working agreement for design , outlining how design will fit into the agile product team.

With the baseline UX defined and a solid design-to-engineering pipeline established, the next immediate challenge was scale. The deadline to sunset the legacy tool was rapidly approaching, turning this phase into a race against the clock.

My focus shifted to collaborating closely with design teams across the broader commerce organization to deeply understand their specific process executions. The objective was to scale the workflow solution to be capable of:

• Integrating seamlessly into any existing commerce tool.

• Picking up the process exactly where one team handed it off.

• Guiding that flow seamlessly through our new system.

Navigating Technical Limitations and Manual Realities: At the time, the reality of the existing workflows was heavily manual and friction-heavy. Cross-team hand-offs relied on cumbersome data dumps, uploading massive Excel sheets, and attaching documents to intake forms. A case would be generated, assigned, worked on, and then passed to the next team using that exact same manual loop.

While our ultimate vision was full automation, we hit a hard technical constraint: the teams supporting the other commerce tools lacked the time and bandwidth to build autonomous data transfer pipelines before the legacy system's shutdown date.

I had to design a pragmatic solution. I optimized the UI for these unavoidable manual hand-offs—streamlining the manual triggers via intake forms to reduce friction—while ensuring the underlying architecture was fully prepared to support seamless, API-driven automation the moment those external pipelines were eventually built. Additional details of the work regarding process optimizations are under NDA.