I was hired into Chase Business as an Assistant Director on the DCE team — about 40 people at the time — and moved into hands-on strategy across several initiatives, including the homepage and the accounts page, the two highest-visited pages on Chase.com and Chase mobile. The new homepage was a major cross-org effort — every feature product owner across the business — and I was part of the team that designed it; it replaced the accounts page as the landing and was adopted as a system across Chase’s lines of business. It also needed governance to protect that real estate for the customer — the first of several times I’d stand up that kind of governance at Chase. That work earned me the lead on Merchant Services. (More on this chapter in the Chase Business case, coming soon.)

The product owners’ first solution was the bolt-on. But as my team scoped the work, we came to doubt it was the right answer — and started nudging toward something bigger. Through our early discussions and research the product owners began to see the possibility too; but to win funding from their leaders, we’d need a case, research, and a vision. So I wrote up the goal I believed the work actually required: define a multi-year vision for Merchant Services Online, decide how it should integrate, and design and test an MVP. (Worth remembering: at the time there was still little digital online banking — banks needed convincing to invest in digital at all.)

In discovery my team hesitated on one thing: merchant data doesn’t behave like credit-and-debit transactions — it’s sales, chargebacks, fees, adjustments, deposits. Did it even belong in Accounts? So we ran a workshop to separate fact from assumption.

Coming out of the workshop, we pushed back on bolting data into Accounts and recommended field research first. I wrote the contextual-inquiry plan we took to leadership — the proposal that won approval to go into the field.

While we waited on approval to go into the field, Product still pressed for the assumed quick win — adding the merchant transactions into the accounts page. Rather than stall, we kept that thread alive. We facilitated a design studio — a design-thinking method of rapid ideation, feedback, and three rounds of iteration in teams with voting — alongside Chase Business, product owners, Paymentech leaders, engineers, and my team. From there we mapped how a merchant moves through reporting today, and how they might use our app: a summary widget on the home page, notifications to review chargebacks, the accounts page, and a reports category for merchants — so the bolt-on could be designed and tested while the deeper research case was still being made.

As we produced our early concepts, this is the walk-through I did after our collaborative ideation sessions. We mocked up a proposal: notifications for chargebacks and actions, the summary widget with the proposed transaction categories, and the in-app promotion. This part of the in-application journey we felt more confident about — except the titles of the five categories, which we hoped user testing and the field research would help us get right.

To know whether our direction was actually better, we ran two rounds: a baseline on the legacy Paymentech software to capture where merchants struggled today, then our prototype to see if the new flow and the five-category widget fixed it. The comparison is what gave the proposal its evidence.

We visited a boutique, a pharmacy, an eyeglass store, a restaurant, and a fast-food spot. It was eye-opening: how much is still done by hand, how antiquated the software is, and why Square was winning. We also learned where the experience confused people — the terms around fees, chargebacks and adjustments, which vary a lot by card. Alongside watching them work, we walked merchants through our early concepts and captured their reactions — the usability feedback the quotes below came from.

After the user feedback and the field research, we still had iterations to go — and we wanted to dig deeper into a vision proposal. So while part of the team worked the MVP iteration, we ran one more Google design sprint to make sure we felt good about both: the North Star vision, and that this MVP would actually work and scale toward it. Competitive review, journey mapping, an “ask the experts” share, How-Might-We framing, and crazy-eights to diverge and converge.

Coming out of the sprint, we built prototypes and ran usability testing again — validating the refinements and getting a last read on the piece we were least sure of: the names of the five categories.

The budget was approved — but the funding to actually build the hub wouldn’t follow for another year. In the meantime my portfolio kept growing: I drove incremental improvements to the widget and its placement, while also leading the Developer Center redesign and the API portal “one API store” strategy — running up to three teams before the org moved to a pods model. That rapid run of wins carried me into the promotion to Head of API Portals, where another team was stood up under me.

The same period, I was brought in on the Merchant Services Developer Center — they wanted to turn their PDFs into real docs. Through discovery I convinced them of a major overhaul, which earned my move into the API Portals work. That thread continues across my Chase Business, Connected Banking and Developer Experience work — each its own deep dive, coming soon.