/CASE STUDY
/OVERRVIEW
OVERVIEW
Masada is Jane.com's internal operations platform — built to replace the spreadsheets, email threads, and disconnected tools that seller onboarding and product approvals had been running on. As Jane transitioned from a daily deals site to a full third-party marketplace, the volume of sellers and products moving through internal workflows outgrew the manual processes holding them together. Masada centralized everything into a single role-based system designed to handle high-throughput daily use without proportional increases in headcount or error rates.
BACKGROUND
Jane.com is a marketplace for boutique products from independent sellers. As the platform grew, so did the operational strain on internal teams. Seller onboarding, product approvals, and publishing were managed through a patchwork of spreadsheets, inboxes, and ad hoc tools — a system held together by manual effort that worked until the volume made it unsustainable. Work ownership was unclear, errors were common, and the gap between what the business needed and what the tooling could support was widening every quarter. Masada was built to close that gap.
THECHALLENGE
The core challenge was designing a single platform that served three distinct internal teams — Merchant Ops, Content, and CX — each with different responsibilities, workflows, and definitions of success. A uniform interface would have been simpler to build but slower to use. The harder design problem was creating role-specific experiences that still shared a source of truth, so work could move across teams without handoff failures or version conflicts. Every design decision was weighed against one question: does this reduce friction under daily, high-volume conditions?
ROLE&RESPONSIBILITIES
As Senior UX Designer, I contributed to UX strategy, workflow design, interaction patterns, and system foundations from discovery through launch. I conducted stakeholder interviews and user shadowing sessions across all three internal teams to understand how work actually moved through the organization — not how it was supposed to move. I designed role-based dashboards and approval flows tailored to each team's operational needs, and maintained a modular component system in Figma covering data tables, filters, status badges, and approval states. Alongside the design work, I collaborated directly with front-end engineers during build to ensure complex workflows translated into production-ready interfaces that held up under real conditions.
PROCESS
The team grounded the work in workflow analysis before touching any UI. Shadowing sessions across Merchant Ops, Content, and CX revealed that teams had built manual workarounds to compensate for missing tooling — increasing cognitive load and error risk at every handoff point. That research reframed the product: Masada wasn't a feature checklist, it was an operational engine optimized for queues, states, and ownership.
A key early decision was to reject a single uniform interface in favor of role-specific experiences — accepting additional design complexity in exchange for speed and accuracy for each team. Merchant Ops received queue-based views with bulk actions, Content reviewers gained detailed product views with inline quality checks, and CX teams received full audit trails and status timelines. Rollout was phased, with teams transitioning incrementally from spreadsheets to minimize disruption while maintaining daily throughput.
IMPACT
Seller onboarding moved significantly faster once the queue-based system replaced manual tracking — enabling marketplace growth without proportional headcount increases. Publishing errors dropped noticeably as validation logic and unified product views replaced the guesswork of spreadsheet-driven approvals. CX response times improved as teams gained real-time visibility into status and history instead of chasing answers across inboxes. Internal teams moved work through the system with fewer handoff failures and less rework. Leadership gained clearer insight into operational bottlenecks and capacity. Masada became the single source of truth for seller onboarding and product publishing at Jane.com — and the operational foundation that supported continued marketplace growth.