Project Context

At PayPal, Partners are the website-building platforms, marketplaces, and other large companies that work with PayPal to facilitate payments between sellers and customers. While this is a key user segment, historically they have not had an experience that addresses their complex needs. They are similar to other SMB or Enterprise-level merchants, but with an additional layer of complexity--  they had to help support both their-- and their customers'-- businesses. Our existing experiences didn't work for them and the lack of offerings put PayPal at a competitive disadvantage, and put a number of key accounts at risk.

Our goal in this product area was to protect and expand revenue in that area by addressing the most urgent needs first, while we built the roadmap along with our foundational understanding of the user space. My goal was to prioritize speed and agility, supporting contractual obligations with key accounts, while also ensuring our understanding and experiences expanded to the broader segment. It couldn't just work for our biggest Partners--it had to work for the broader segment. ​

Constraints & Opportunities

Recruiting in the Partner space is complex and often messy. Due to most of the accounts being "managed," I had to navigate complex layers of buy-in and approvals from their relationship and account managers. 

These challenges enabled us to develop and maintain key relationships in the Partner space, working closely with sales and support to leverage our ongoing efforts to expand revenue. This enabled us to leverage our internal subject matter experts to help triangulate our users, their needs, and how our experiences were working for them. We also identified an opportunity to build an internal-facing version of the experience to help our internal account teams provide more timely, robust support, helping them further protect and grow relationships.

Building the Foundation

Given this was a new user segment, we needed to begin by understanding our users and their needs. Given time constraints due to contractual negotiations with key Partner accounts, we aimed to develop that understanding in conjunction with building the basic features to meet obligations. 

• I developed Role Personas in order to catalog primary and secondary user roles, as well as their needs, motivations, opportunities, and drive empathy across key stakeholders.
• I built a Jobs to be Done (JTBD) framework for primary and secondary users to help us understand complex user needs, challenges and opportunities. These JTBD helped us build useful, desireable features as well as informing future roadmap across product areas for subsequent releases.
• I created in-depth User Journeys to help understand the end-to-end experience for users, including how the rest of their tech stack might impact feature offerings and user context.
• One of the most enduring foundational pieces developed from the research was my Design Principles for Parter Experiences that helped inform development of any Partner-facing experiences we might build. 

Developing the Experience

Given the recruiting challenges and limited population, I had to get creative with my approach to ensure our experiences were built around user needs and generalizable to the broader Partner segment.

• Working directly with end-users, I worked to ensure our in-depth understanding of the diversity of user needs. I combined generative and evaluative methodologies to leverage in-progress designs to help guide conversations and get real-time feedback on experiences we were building.
• I helped traingulate insights via a series of Workshops with internal stakeholders and subject matter experts to gain additional depth of knowledge in key areas, as well ad understand the diversity of perspectives across Partners and their users.

Through this research, I also worked to streamline and simplify future Partner research to help ensure timely and impactful insights. Through development of a research panel and processes for outreach, I was able to enable broader, more timely access to end-users for Partner research, as well as other experiences that touched this key user segment.

Evaluation & Iteration

Through our Pilot launch and moving into broader release, we continually assessed our experience to identify and prioritize improvements as well as the broader product roadmap, both short- and long-term. 

• Prior to launch, I performed a series of expert reviews to identify and address usability issues, prioritize feature improvements, and assess accessibility of the experience
• We used ongoing research activities with Pilot Partners to understand usability, utility, and efficacy of experiences and features post-launch.

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