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 primary constraint? I had exactly two sprints to hit the ground running, untangle the process, and deliver an engineering-ready design.

To get a lay of the land, I had several 1:1 with the business lead, design strategist and the design team to understand the vision, objective and the progress so far. It was clear that the team had missed a milestone and there wasn't a plan in place to show that we could get back in track to not derail the project timelines. We created and shared an action plan for the next few weeks.

Prior to my assignment, design, research and process architects were engaged by business to build an understanding of the current landscape and process. They had built a massive repo containing journey maps, process flows, and market research. Given the aggressive timeline, I had to make sense of this data fast to inform my design decisions. I used Copilot (the only AI vetted to be used at the org) to rapidly synthesize extensive research data to generate insights, and identify patterns to inform my design direction. Parallelly, I had long sessions with the product architect to understand the current ecosystem, its limitations and any potential blockers.

After rapid prototyping and iterating through multiple variations, we zeroed in on a Single-Page Application (SPA) solution. This would allow us to embed the workflow components (built as MFE's) in any commerce tool where workflow had to be integrated.

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 and workflow organizations to deeply understand their specific process executions. The objective was to build a highly scalable solution 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.