From Paying for Exposure to Paying for Results

The Marketplace Was Solving the Wrong Problem.

Service businesses don't lose unsold products: they lose unsold time. An empty 2pm slot expires at midnight; a retail item just sits on the shelf until tomorrow.

Get Featured charged every business the same monthly fee, whether or not promotions led to bookings — so ROI was impossible to prove. Leadership's fix: pay only when Vera generates a completed appointment. That reframes the challenge from increasing visibility to creating measurable demand.

who felt it

Design Opportunity

Instead of designing another promotional tool, we had an opportunity to rethink how businesses acquire customers.

The challenge wasn't building better discounts—it was designing a scalable operating model that could automatically connect available appointments with the right customers while creating measurable value for businesses and Vagaro.

Designing the Operating Model

Replacing a subscription marketplace required more than a new interface—it required a new operating model.

Instead of businesses manually creating promotions, they would define their goals while Vera continuously identified opportunities, matched eligible customers, generated promotions, and measured results.

Designing that experience meant creating a system where business strategy, automation, payments, and reporting worked together as one cohesive platform.

The operating model centered on a simple idea: businesses define their objectives, while Vera handles the execution. Rather than managing individual campaigns, businesses configure guardrails—such as eligible services, providers, and pricing constraints. Vera then evaluates appointment availability, customer eligibility, and marketplace rules to generate relevant promotional opportunities. Every booking flows into performance pricing, reporting, and future optimization.

Business Configuration

Turning Business Goals into Automation

Instead of asking businesses to manually create campaigns, I designed a configuration experience where they define business goals and operating constraints.

Businesses choose which services and providers participate, set discount limits, and define availability preferences. These settings become the guardrails Vera uses when generating promotional opportunities.

This shifted the business owner's role from managing campaigns to defining strategy, while allowing Vera to automate execution at scale.

Now that businesses have defined their intent, how does Vera actually decide what to do?

Designing Vera's Decision Architecture

With business goals defined, the next challenge was determining how Vera should make decisions.

Working closely with Engineering and the Machine Learning team, I translated business objectives into a scalable decision framework—defining the rules that determine when promotions should be generated, which customers are eligible, and what constraints ensure promotions remain valuable for both businesses and customers.

Rather than designing individual scenarios, I focused on creating a flexible rule system that could support future growth as new targeting capabilities and data became available.

Demand Generation

Designing How Businesses Acquire Customers

The success of Fill My Books depended on more than generating promotions—it depended on delivering them to the right customers without disrupting the marketplace.

Rather than maximizing reach immediately, I helped define a phased targeting strategy that began with orphaned customers—people no longer actively engaged with a business.

This allowed Vagaro to create new booking opportunities while protecting existing business relationships, establishing a trusted foundation for future expansion into broader customer segments.

Launching with orphaned customers wasn't a limitation—it was a deliberate strategy to validate the platform while protecting marketplace trust.

Once promotions reached the right customers, the next challenge was ensuring the platform could accurately attribute bookings, collect performance fees, and measure success. That required designing an entirely new payment infrastructure.

One Booking Experience. Multiple Revenue Paths.

Replacing subscriptions with performance pricing required more than updating checkout: it required redesigning how revenue moved through the platform.

I partnered with Engineering, Payments, and Finance to define the operational logic behind performance billing, including deposit scenarios, booking attribution, fee timing, cancellations, refunds, and reporting.

The result was a flexible payment infrastructure capable of supporting different business policies while ensuring every successful booking could be accurately measured and billed.

The infrastructure needed to support multiple payment scenarios while maintaining accurate revenue attribution across every booking.

Building Trust Through Transparency

Reporting & Optimization

Performance-based pricing only works when businesses can clearly see the value they're receiving.

I designed the reporting experience to connect Vera's decisions with measurable business outcomes, giving businesses visibility into bookings generated, revenue influenced, customer acquisition, and performance fees.

Rather than acting as a static dashboard, reporting became the feedback loop that helped businesses evaluate ROI while laying the foundation for future Vera reporting experiences.

Reporting view — bookings, revenue, and ROI attributed to Vera.

Strategic Product Decisions

Every major product decision involved balancing business goals, technical constraints, and marketplace trust. Rather than optimizing for a single release, I focused on building a foundation the platform could scale from over time.

Once the platform architecture was defined, the remaining challenge wasn't designing individual features: it was aligning multiple teams to deliver a cohesive product experience across five platforms.

Connecting Strategy to Execution

Cross-Functional Leadership

As the lead designer, I owned the end-to-end product experience: from defining product requirements and business rules to designing the marketplace workflow, payment infrastructure, reporting, and migration strategy across five platforms.

I partnered closely with Engineering, Machine Learning/AI, Data, Payments, and Marketing to translate complex business goals into one cohesive system that could scale beyond the initial launch.

My role wasn't simply designing interfaces—it was connecting every part of the platform into a unified product experience.

Impact Across the Marketplace

I designed Fill My Books as more than a new feature—it established the foundation for a scalable demand generation platform that created value across the entire marketplace.

Its impact can be measured through three perspectives: the businesses using the platform, the customers receiving personalized promotions, and Vagaro's long-term platform strategy.

The most valuable outcome of the project wasn't a single feature or metric. It was creating a reusable foundation that future Vera products could continue building upon.

Designing What Holds It Together

Reflection

Fill My Books reinforced what I enjoy most about product design: connecting complex systems into experiences that feel simple.

Leading this project meant designing far beyond individual screens. It required translating business strategy into product behavior, defining decision frameworks, building revenue infrastructure, and aligning cross-functional teams around one cohesive platform.

It strengthened my belief that the most impactful products aren't built through isolated features: they're built through systems that connect people, technology, and business goals in meaningful ways.

That's the kind of work I want to continue building.

I design what holds it together.