In startups, internal tools are rarely a priority. You can brute-force operations with manual work until volume makes it painful. As Wert scaled, the Admin Panel became a bottleneck. Support, Sales, and Compliance used it daily for lookups, order management, and partner configs, but it didn't reliably support those jobs. On top of that, the platform was mid-migration to a new backoffice layer, so the underlying services were changing while teams still depended on the old ones.

The goal was to keep Support fast and reliable as volume grew, without waiting for the migration to finish.

Approach

JTBD first. When things look broken, the risk is trying to fix everything at once. I mapped the actual jobs teams did daily and ranked them by frequency and risk. That told us what to fix first. What's slowing the team down most right now?

Quick wins built trust. We fixed the most painful flows first, the ones that forced teams to switch tools and work around bugs. That proved the work was worth it and gave the business confidence to support further improvements.

Progressive delivery. With the backend mid-migration, not everything was available at once. Shipped in small releases as new endpoints came online, coordinating with backend on what was feasible in each rollout.

Patterns and guardrails. I set up reusable UX patterns and templates for screens, forms, and UI states. The goal was to let the team ship new and updated flows without pulling Design into every ticket.

Documentation. Documented workflows and expected outcomes so the team had a shared reference instead of tribal knowledge. When things change fast, written clarity is what keeps teams aligned.

Impact

• New jobs covered by Admin Panel reduced tool-switching and manual workarounds.
• Time on task dropped by 30–50% across core flows due to improved UX.
• Design patterns and templates sped up future releases. The team could ship new features without reinventing the UI each time.
• Kept operations stable throughout the migration, which was the hardest part.

Document verification has a high failure rate across the industry — according to SumSub, up to 50% of KYC checks require resubmission (poor lighting, blurry photos, expired documents, mismatched data). Wert was no exception. Verification for larger purchases can take minutes or hours, so few stay on screen. Users rely on follow-up emails to complete the process.

After a necessary major security update, we changed how the widget could be triggered (the details are sensitive). The resubmission flow broke: users could no longer return to their verification directly from emails and had to restart the entire purchase from the partner's website. Re-verification drop-off rose from 52% to 64%. High-value user KYC recovery fell from 15% to 9%.

Approach

Map the full journey, not just the break. After a UX audit, the problems went beyond broken links. Emails didn't reflect the case or context, had no design, and were easily replicated by fraudsters. Support couldn't help users without routing them through partner sites. No tracking to understand where users dropped.

Reframe the problem. Resubmission isn't a checkout retry. It's a separate user journey with different context, timing, and trust. Users come back hours or days later, often from a different device, with little context of where they left off. I proposed separating resubmission from the purchase flow entirely with a standalone widget that works without a partner session.

Redesign every touchpoint. Transactional emails redesigned for clarity, branding, and trust. Direct resubmission link for Support. So, we no longer send users to partner sites for KYC issues. Amplitude tracking across the new flow so we could see what was actually happening.

Drive it across squads. This wasn't on my squad's roadmap. I saw the drop-off numbers, made the case for urgency, set up the work with a frontend lead outside my squad, and we shipped everything within a month.

Impact

• New standalone resubmission flow. Users could now return and complete verification directly, from any channel.
• Redesigned emails with clear context, step-by-step guidance, and trustworthy design.
• Re-verification drop-off: 52% before → 64% after security update → 27% after release.
• High-value user KYC recovery (failed → completed): ~15% before → 9% after security update → ~17% after release and held steady at ~18% median over the following quarter.