Staples print services transformation

In short

I created and executed the design strategy that informed product portfolios with the goal to increase sales and customer satisfaction of Staples print services.

As the product design manager, I led a team of 6 designers to facilitate the work between them and with various teams across the organization. Working closely with my product counterpart, I based the strategy on customer research, data, and business objectives. I crafted an experience vision with UX outcomes that turned into product portfolios. Each portfolio delivered multiple experiments that were A/B tested to prove their value before releasing to a 100% and were monitored after launch to continue iterating throughout subsequent program increments.

Impact and results:

+200% sales increase since 2021

+25M of annual traffic in 2025

7% increase in conversion rate driving $10M in annual sales

4% increase in category pages' AOV driving $3M in annual sales

8% increase in design builder success translating into $5M annual impact

Portfolios I oversaw:

Next, you'll find an overview about how I crafted the UX strategy for Staples print services and executed it. If you want details about a specific product portfolio, you can read the product discovery and assurance case study.

A comprehensive framework for the design process

During my time as product design manager with Staples, I led a team of 6 designers and collaborated with various teams across the organization. While every project had different needs and resources, this is a summary of the process, activities, and collaborators I worked with to release multiple initiatives:

Designing Research

I am a big advocate for both product managers and designers to plan and conduct the research activities needed to make evidence-based decisions. This way we have first hand access to the insights that help us choose the problems and opportunities we want to tackle with intention.

To do this, I facilitated research questions workshops with diverse participants like product managers, product designers, and other stakeholders from CX, marketing, business intelligence, and executives. During these workshops, we identified the questions and gaps we wanted to answer and prioritized them based on their risk and value–this was really important to focus our resources on the areas that could make the biggest impact.

With that, I refined the questions, then identified the methodologies needed to gather the answers, coordinated the research efforts among all participants, and defined the frameworks to collect and document the data with a distributed team, which was crucial to synthesize them later on.

The case for creating and sharing an experience vision

Once we had the insights, I crafted an experience vision and directed a designer to create a storyboard, which was a great tool that -quoting Jared Spool- provided a flag to march towards.

I presented the omni-channel experience vision to our executive stakeholders and once I got their buy-in, I shared it with the entire product and development teams during our PI planning.

Given the large and diverse audience, it was very important that the visuals showed minimal references of UI, not to get hung up on details or to prescribe solutions early on.

The experience vision helped to get different teams and stakeholders excited and committed to provide the best customer experience while getting reassurance that we were going to find the solutions together.

Many of the customer and associate stories shown in the experience vision became real features that were released or are currently in development.

Business and UX outcomes, a match that makes a service's heaven

My product counterpart provided clarity about the two business outcomes we needed to tackle. There are different metrics and indicators that were used to measure them, but every initiative we worked on was essentially trying to increase the percentage of customers who make a purchase or purchase again.

I led my design team and collaborated with our product partners to create opportunity solution trees that aligned business and UX outcomes; these became the product portfolios that we used to create hypotheses and experiments.

I facilitated solutioning workshops periodically in every program increment  to create hypotheses with our product trios, i.e. product managers, designers, and software engineers.

Supporting designers to do their best work

Once hypotheses were created, I directed the design execution by supporting designers during the iteration of every design artifact and test, including user flows, wireframes, prototypes, usability tests, and accessibility documentation.

Each designer often worked on a intitiative as the sole design resource within their development pod, I supported them by providing revisions and working sessions as needed and also by fostering a culture of peer-to-peer feedback so designers could share their work with each other, even if they were working on different projects.

As a manager, I needed to have full visibility and understanding of the projects everyone in my team was working on so that I could offer clear direction to them, from choosing the right type of delivarable or fidelity to use at every stage of a project, to mockups through multiple breakpoints, feedback about specific interactions or UI patterns, etc.

Validate and iterate

When working for a site with more than 25 million sessions a year, every decision and percentile increment makes a big difference for the business.

Most experiments followed a similar A/B testing process so they were released in increments of 5% traffic to compare them against control and were only released to 100% if the projected business or UX success metrics were met or exceeded.

Once they were released, I consumed data and analytics reports, as well as observed behavioural data in FullStory to identify possible pain points or frictions that needed our attention to iterate.

Designing for people, not just outcomes

In addition to the favorable business outcomes these initiatives provided to Staples, I'm really proud of the difference the work I did made for customers and associates alike.

By the end of my time at Staples, I had deep understanding of their wide customer base, store associates, and their needs across the multiple touchpoints of the entire experience. Knowing that the decisions we made impacted so many business owners, educators, students, parents, workers, and more, made advocating for them a task that I took seriously and passionately.

Our team, including product and development, was small for the size of the business we powered. I had to be smart with our resources and lead my team to work on the initiatives that could make the biggest impact for both the business and customers.

In UX world, we talk a lot about empathy with our users, and of course this is important, but when we had the mission to double the sales in a span of 3 years, it was equally important to apply the same empathy to build allyships with the people I worked with, especially between the triad of product, design, and development.

Behind every wireframe and prototype produced, the work was sustained in research, collaboration, and respect for everyone's contributions. I feel fortunate and proud to have been a facilitator and connector for initiatives that not only produced great results but also fostered lasting relationships with my design team and colleagues.