From One Channel to a Loyalty Platform

Where the product started

In 2017, Cartera supported one primary member experience: online affiliate shopping through a hosted website. Individual partner implementations could become heavily customized, which made it harder to improve the underlying product consistently.

The opportunity was larger than a website redesign. Partners needed more ways to place loyalty commerce inside the products their customers already used.

Designing across channels

I led product design across this expansion. The work included setting experience direction, establishing reusable patterns, bringing design into roadmap discussions earlier, and using prototypes to help teams make decisions.

Each channel introduced a different constraint. An API gives a partner more control than a hosted site. An extension has to earn a place inside a customer’s browsing habits. An SDK has to fit into an existing mobile app. Card-linked and dining offers introduce new enrollment and transaction models.

The job was not to make every surface identical. It was to decide which ideas should stay consistent and which needed to adapt to the channel or partner.

Moving from transactions toward ongoing use

The product also grew beyond a list of merchants and links. We worked on onboarding, Favorites, recently viewed merchants, alerts, elevated earnings, targeted bonuses, and other ways to help members understand the value of the program and return to it.

These capabilities gave product and marketing teams more useful controls. They also required clearer standards so a new feature could work across different brands without becoming a separate product each time.

What changed in the design practice

As the platform grew, design had to work differently. I helped establish reusable interaction patterns, brought responsive behavior into reviews earlier, and increased the use of working prototypes when static screens left important questions unanswered.

I also partnered across Product Design, product management, engineering, design systems, marketing, and client teams. That work became the basis for a clearer operating model, covered in the companion case study about building the Product Design function.

What this work taught me

Shared platforms create leverage only when teams are deliberate about what they standardize. Too much customization fragments the product. Too much uniformity ignores real differences in brand, channel, and customer expectations.

My role has been to help teams find that line, make it visible, and turn it into a product people can use.