Fixing Print for Millions With a Clear UX Strategy for Staples Print Services

In short

I created and executed the design strategy that informed product portfolios aimed at increasing sales and improving customer satisfaction of Staples' print services.

As Product Design Manager, I led a team of six designersand collaborated closely with partners across the organization. Working closely with my product counterpart, I grounded our strategy in customer research, data, and business goals. I crafted an experience vision with clear UX outcomes that informed our product portfolios. Each portfolio delivered multiple experiments that were A/B tested to prove their value before full rollout and were continuously monitored to fuel ongoing iterations during subsequent program increments.

Impact and results:

Portfolios I oversaw:

Next, you'll find an overview about how I crafted the UX strategy for Staples print services and executed it. For a deeper dive into one of the product portfolios, 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 six 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. Direct access to insights helps us choose the problems and opportunities we want to tackle with intention.

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

Afterward, I refined the questions, 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. This structure was essential for effective synthesis later on.

The case for creating and sharing an experience vision

Once we had actionable insights, I crafted an omnichannel experience vision and directed a designer to create a storyboard. This was a great tool that, as Jared Spool putis it, provided a flag to march towards.

I presented the 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. Because of the 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 aligned teams, built excitement, and created shared commitment to delivering the best customer experience. Many of the customer and associate stories depicted in the vision ultimately became real features—either launched or in development.

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

My product counterpart provided clarity about our two key business outcomes. While they were measured through several KPIs, every initiative ultimately aimed to increase the percentage of customers who made a purchase—or made one 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 also facilitated recurring solutioning workshops with product trios (product managers, designers, and engineers) each PI to generate and refine these hypotheses.

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.

While each designer typically served as the sole design resource for 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 maintained full visibility into each designer’s initiatives so I could provide clear direction—from choosing the right fidelity at each project stage to reviewing mockups through multiple breakpoints, and providing feedback about specific interactions or UI patterns.

Validate and iterate

With more than 25 million annual site sessions, even small improvements had meaningful business impact. Most experiments followed a staged A/B testing process, beginning with 5% traffic and scaling to 100% only if business and UX success metrics were met or exceeded.

After launch, I monitored analytics reports and behavioral data in FullStory to identify possible pain points or frictions that needed our attention to iterate.

Designing for people, not just outcomes

Beyond the business results, I’m most proud of the difference this work made for customers and store associates.

By the end of my tenure 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 was small for the scale of the business we supported, so leading us to focus on the initiatives with the highest potential impact was crucial.

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 three 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 was a foundation of research, collaboration, and respect. I’m proud to have served as a facilitator and connector who helped deliver strong business outcomes while cultivating meaningful, lasting relationships across my team and partners.