The Challenge

Adding a first product was the first action we prompted trial merchants to take, but the creation form was daunting for beginners and hadn't been updated with modern design patterns. Drop-off was significant, and the page had no single owner—pricing, variants, shipping, compliance, and inventory teams all had stakes.

The Work

I designed 18 targeted "precision cuts" to make the form more approachable without disrupting advanced merchants' workflows—collapsible optional fields, clarifying tooltips, and streamlined information architecture. The real challenge was coordination: getting buy-in from multiple stakeholder groups and executive sign-off required building relationships across teams and making the case for each change. In the final weeks, two vacationing executives requested we also improve variant handling (typically a year-long project)—we delivered it in weeks by leveraging the cross-functional relationships we'd already built.

The Impact

Improved trial-to-active merchant retention by approximately 12% in the first two weeks post-trial. The work demonstrated that thoughtful, coordinated small improvements can have outsized impact—there was no single "big reveal," just the compounding effect of many smart decisions working together.