Fixing a broken service behind the catalog

A customer-facing symptom, a back-stage cause

When a product doesn't appear, or a listing shows the wrong information, the customer feels it instantly. But the cause sits deep in the back stage: catalog data, upstream processes, and the hand-offs between teams. These weren't design problems on a screen — they were service problems in a system, and they were slow and expensive to resolve.

I treated the catalog like a service to be fixed: find where it breaks, understand why, and redesign the process so it breaks less and recovers faster.

Following the errors to their source

Rather than clearing tickets one by one, I looked for patterns — recurring error types, the steps where data degraded, and the points where the process created its own failures.

• Root-cause analysis across hundreds of catalog and listing errors to find the systemic culprits.
• Mapping the process end to end to expose slow hand-offs and avoidable rework.
• Using operational data to prioritise the fixes that would move resolution time the most.

Redesigning the process, not just the fix

I streamlined how issues were caught and resolved, cut steps that added no value, and put the back-stage process on a footing where problems surfaced earlier and got resolved faster. I also ran high-stakes catalog moments end to end — including Apple Month — where getting the process right directly protected the customer experience.

Add one or two concrete mechanisms here — a checklist you introduced, an automation, a new hand-off — so this reads as your design decisions, not just outcomes.

Faster, cleaner, more reliable

This is the experience most UX designers don't have: I've run the operations behind a customer journey, so I know how to design one that actually holds up when it meets a real back office.