Case Study Portfolio

From Stagnant Rewards to Everyday Currency: Turning Points into a Payment Rail

THE PROBLEM

American Express cardmembers had accumulated billions of Membership Rewards points but rarely used them. The program was perceived as a "someday" benefit — something you save for a big trip — not as part of daily spending behavior. The challenge: how do you shift deep-seated consumer psychology around a stored-value asset?

THE INSIGHT (Jobs To Be Done)

Clayton Christensen's Jobs To Be Done framework asks: what job is the customer hiring this product to do? We discovered that cardmembers didn't want to think about points redemption at checkout — they wanted frictionless value, automatically applied to purchases they were already making. The job wasn't "redeem my points." It was "make my spending feel rewarded without extra effort."

THE APPROACH

Launched a frictionless micro-redemption pilot in NYC taxicabs — an environment with immediate, low-stakes transactions that let us validate behavioral change before scaling. This was a deliberate small-bet strategy: prove the model cheaply, then expand with confidence.

THE OUTCOME

Successfully validated the model and scaled the frictionless redemption architecture to Uber, Walmart, Best Buy, and McDonald's — establishing a multi-brand ecosystem of everyday spend redemption that transformed points from a savings vehicle into a daily-use payment layer.

WHAT I LEARNED

The biggest risk in consumer product innovation isn't technical failure — it's launching at scale without behavioral validation. The taxi pilot cost a fraction of a national launch and de-risked an assumption we couldn't have tested any other way.

Building a First-Party Data Engine: IoT + Live Events + 100M Daily Transaction

THE PROBLEM

American Express was heavily dependent on third-party agency data for cardmember engagement at live events (concerts, sports, brand activations). This created a two-week lag between a physical customer interaction and any digital follow-up — killing the relevance of outreach and leaving premium co-sponsorship revenue on the table.

THE INSIGHT

The richest engagement signal a brand can capture is a physical touch — a person choosing to interact with your brand in the real world. We had that signal at every live event we sponsored. We just weren't capturing it in real time.

THE APPROACH

Connected smart mobile devices with IoT card readers at live events, enabling real-time capture of physical customer interactions and linking them directly to deep historical cardmember transaction profiles — already available through the patented real-time transaction parsing infrastructure I had built (Patent 9,934,517, processing 100M+ transactions daily). The result was a first-party data engine: every event touch was matched to a cardmember profile within seconds, enabling same-day personalized follow-up with relevance that third-party agency data could never achieve.

THE OUTCOME

→ 30-point increase in Net Promoter Score (NPS)

→ Established a new premium event co-sponsorship revenue stream

→ Created a predictable first-party customer acquisition channel — eliminating dependency on third-party data vendors

→ Built the data infrastructure that now underpins the hyper-personalization strategies described in the Info-share section

WHAT I LEARNED

First-party data strategies require infrastructure investment before they generate returns. The hardest part wasn't the IoT integration — it was convincing stakeholders to invest in the data capture layer before the revenue case was fully proven. The product leader's job is to make that invisible investment visible enough to fund.

From Single-Rail to $35B: Designing a Multi-Rail B2B Payment Ecosystem

THE PROBLEM

Large enterprise accounts payable platforms were rejecting American Express card as a payment option because of interchange fee economics. On invoices worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, even a 1–2% card fee creates a meaningful supplier cost. The result: a ceiling on card volume growth that no amount of marketing spend could break through.

THE STRATEGIC INSIGHT

The traditional response — lower card fees — was a race to the bottom that destroyed the economics of the card business. The real opportunity was to reframe the value proposition entirely: instead of competing on price, become the infrastructure layer of the entire AP workflow. If we owned the workflow, card volume would follow organically where it made sense — and ACH/RTP volume would capture the rest.

THE APPROACH

Designed and launched a multi-rail payment architecture integrating ACH and RTP (Real-Time Payments) alongside the existing card rails — all embedded within the AP automation platforms that enterprise finance teams were already using: Coupa, SAP Ariba, Goldman Sachs TxB, and 20+ fintech partners.

Key elements of the architecture:

→ Bidirectional ERP data flows for automated invoice matching and reconciliation

→ Automated compliance onboarding for new suppliers across payment rails

→ AI startup acquisition and integration to fully automate the invoice-to-payment lifecycle end-to-end

The team I led spanned product, engineering, compliance, legal, and partner management — 7 departments moving in parallel under a compressed timeline.

THE OUTCOME

→ $35B+ in annual transaction volume (grown from under $1B — in 5 years)

→ 144% YoY B2B spend growth

→ 30% YoY increase in customer acquisition

→ 15X growth in transaction volume on the embedded finance platform

→ 2X customer acquisition rate post-AI integration

→ $0.5M new revenue + $1M operational savings from invoice-to-payment workflows

→ 27% portfolio expansion from acquisition and integration activities

→ Time-to-market compressed by 3 months vs. previous regulated product launches

WHAT I LEARNED

Enterprise platform plays require you to subordinate short-term product metrics to long-term ecosystem positioning. For 18 months, the ACH/RTP rails showed modest volume because the workflow integrations were still being built. The pressure to show immediate return was real. The discipline to hold the strategy while building the foundation is what ultimately produced a 15X growth outcome.

Zero to Digital: How We Eliminated 70% of Customer Calls and Saved $4M Annually

THE PROBLEM

American Express's premium services channel — a high-touch, phone-based concierge offering for premium cardmembers — was generating enormous call volume for tasks that were, at their core, transactional: address changes, statement questions, benefit activations, dispute submissions. Every call cost the company money and consumed agent capacity that should have been reserved for genuinely complex member needs. The underlying issue was architectural: the premium services platform had been built in layers over many years, creating fragmented digital touchpoints that were inconsistent, hard to navigate, and unable to complete common tasks without agent intervention.

THE STRATEGIC APPROACH

Rather than optimizing individual digital touchpoints in isolation, I led a platform consolidation program designed around one principle: if we could map every reason a premium cardmember calls, we could build a digital experience that handles 90% of those reasons without human involvement — and make the remaining 10% better by giving agents richer context when they do pick up.

Key initiatives:

→ Mapped the complete "reason for call" taxonomy using 6 months of call center data

→ Redesigned the digital self-service architecture from the ground up using API-enabled microservices — replacing the fragmented legacy platform

→ Integrated Adobe and Salesforce workflows to unify cardmember data across channels, reducing agent effort by 50% on escalated cases

→ Built real-time escalation handoffs so that digital-to-agent transitions were seamless rather than frustrating

THE OUTCOME

→ 70% reduction in customer contact volume on the premium services channel

→ $4M in annual operational cost savings

→ 20% improvement in content management platform efficiency

→ 50% reduction in cross-channel workflow effort

→ Launched ShopSmall.com redesign with Etsy, increasing small business engagement 10%

WHAT I LEARNED

Digital transformation programs fail most often not because of technology, but because of change management. Every stakeholder — call center agents, compliance reviewers, technology partners — had a rational reason to resist. The product leader's job is to make the destination real enough that people want to move toward it, not away from it.