Amex Points Promotion Manager
Project background
Credit card companies are in an all-out arms race to attract premium customers, and rewards programs are the battleground. The Membership Rewards group at American Express brought in my team to help them stay competitive — they had high hopes for driving program engagement through targeted promotions (offering, say, a 20% discount on using rewards points toward flights on a specific airline), but their internal systems for setting up those offers were painfully outdated. Few on the marketing team even knew how to launch a promotion, and they were constrained to simplistic targeting and timing when it came to enticing key customers to spend their points.
The project began with a deep-dive into Amex’s existing systems and processes — which meant navigating a byzantine web of legacy tools. Field names weren’t consistent across campaign setup forms, repetitive manual data entry was the norm, and a “chuck it over the fence” mentality meant no one person had an end-to-end view of what setting up a campaign actually required.
The slides below are from the conclusion of our research phase, in which we spoke with both end users and the developers who maintained the various backend systems. The interviews served two goals: understand each person’s role in the campaign setup process and the tools they used to carry it out, and surface their pain points.
Problem framing
Our holistic view of the campaign setup process built trust with both the marketing team and the development team — and the problems we identified made the weakness of the current system impossible to ignore, along with the upside of fixing it.
With that foundation in place, we created sketch concepts for validation with the client team and the tool’s future users. After several rounds of workshops and prioritization sessions, we translated our key research recommendations into a set of concrete tool concepts.
From vision to MVP
Our concept presentation gave us a clear picture of where the client wanted the tool to go — but overhauling the entire system at once wasn’t practical. So we designed a UI framework that could grow over time, seamlessly incorporating new capabilities as they were built out. Working closely with the internal tech team, we shipped an MVP within months that was deliberately future-proofed, giving the client room to fold in more functionality as the roadmap progressed.
The overarching structure
The original campaign setup process was a maze of disjointed forms spread across multiple tools — some of them long, requiring input from several people. To fit the ideal workflow, we designed a card-based flow that broke those sprawling forms into manageable chunks. Users could navigate the setup cards by scrolling or jumping between sections with in-page controls, and a dashboard view gave anyone a at-a-glance understanding of everything needed to launch a campaign.
Consolidating tasks under one interface meant key fields were no longer missed or filled out incorrectly across systems. A full content overhaul standardized field names and parameter options across the board, cutting a major source of confusion. The animations below were part of our delivery to the engineering team, alongside full spec documents and interactive prototypes.
Delivery and design
Building a viable design system is never a clean process, and our designs were regularly stress-tested by newly uncovered edge cases and technical constraints. Through frequent user feedback sessions and ongoing dialogue with the tech team, we refined the final system into something that could flex to accommodate whatever future campaign configurations the client might need.
Training site delivery
After the final developer handoff, we built a microsite to help users get comfortable with the new system. The training site included a step-by-step walkthrough of a full campaign setup to clarify each person’s new role, alongside supporting content explaining how the tool would make their day-to-day work easier.
