Evolving a Consumer Platform at Scale
Design leadership across photos, personalization, and commerce for a multi-year, multi-team platform serving millions of families.
Shutterfly
2014-2020
Role:
Director of UX, multi-year ownership
Scope:
Photos platform · Personalization & ML · AI-assisted creation · Full-funnel commerce · Navigation & Content Architecture · Accessibility · Acquisition SSO
Context:
$1B+ consumer platform serving ~10M customers with ~75% returning usage
At Shutterfly, I led design for the company’s core consumer platform over multiple years, spanning photos, personalization, commerce, navigation, and platform systems serving millions of customers.
My scope included stewardship of the photos platform and its evolution, AI-driven personalization experiences (face recognition, automatic tagging, memories), and full-funnel commerce. From discovery and faceted search through checkout and account settings, I led high-impact initiatives including the company’s accessibility program, transitioning Shutterfly and acquisitions to an SSO backend, and experimentation across navigation, promotions, and merchandising.
Many of the decisions I owned (the architecture of the photos platform, navigation structure) were tied to Q4 performance and had long-term implications for system integrity and business outcomes.
This work reflects my approach to design leadership at scale: owning complex systems, making irreversible decisions with clarity, and balancing innovation with trust, governance, and business reality.
Shutterfly at a Glance
A place to build photobooks, to create holiday cards, and to personalize just about anything—that’s Shutterfly. It’s a blend of traditional e-commerce with deep personalization, with photos living at the center of all experiences.
The business is Q4 based. During my time our business goals were focused on how to build value during times that are not winter holidays. My teams worked on net-new ideas using ML/AI, simplifying and optimizing core flows, launching platforms, and bringing in recurring revenue through photos engagement.
Key Decisions and Tradeoffs
Across my tenure at Shutterfly, I was responsible for several high-risk, long-horizon decisions where UX choices carried direct implications for platform integrity, user trust, and revenue performance. The following examples highlight the type of judgment and tradeoffs required to steward a complex consumer platform at scale.
Why it mattered:
This decision shaped whether Shutterfly would continue to treat photos as a means to an ecomm order, or invest in them as a first-class platform capable of driving habitual engagement and long-term value.
Bringing ThisLife’s timeline-based storage into a legacy, folder-based ecosystem introduced real risk: performance constraints, resistance from existing users, and the need for a flexible component that could scale across surfaces, sizes, and use cases. The photos platform had to be responsive, lightweight, and resilient—while supporting libraries containing thousands of images.
Strategically, this work enabled Shutterfly to maintain an always-growing photo library through background uploads, increasing return visits and creating a tighter feedback loop between stored memories and product creation. It also reinforced a broader company ambition: positioning Shutterfly not just as a photo printing business, but as a technology platform centered on personal media.
Photos Platform Architecture
Key Decision:
Architect the photos experience as a persistent, always-on platform—rather than a one-time upload utility—to support continuous engagement, cross-surface reuse, and long-term user trust.
Risks:
Increased platform complexity, performance constraints at scale, and resistance from existing users accustomed to folder-based uploads, with no guarantee that Shutterfly could successfully compete with emerging platform players.
Upshot:
This decision embedded a long-term business strategy directly into the UX, enabling frequent return behavior and tighter integration between stored photos and commerce—while positioning Shutterfly as a technology platform centered on personal media, not just a transactional printing service. This also established shared components that allowed multiple teams to work against the same photos foundation without fragmenting user behavior.
Filters and Edit History
Shutterfly had primitive photo editing (sepia tone, anyone?) and we were playing in an Instagram world. We looked at enhancing our photos capabilities by adding advanced editing and custom filters.
The biggest issue wasn’t the filter selection or the flows, it was how we would store the photo data on the backend. One option, duplicating the photo each time an edit was made, was unwieldy and would balloon library size, and cost. The other option, storing the edits as hidden layers, allowed the user to “undo” at any given time. While this was clearly the user’s expectation, the engineering cost of this feature was huge.
After ideation and research, we chose not to incorporate advanced editing. We were not able to offer a good user experience with the existing legacy backend.
This decision set a precedent: visually compelling features would not ship unless they aligned with long-term platform integrity.
Key Tradeoffs
Upside: Preserved system integrity, performance, and scalability
Cost: Forgoing a visually appealing feature that competitors were promoting
Automation vs. Trust in Personalization & “Magic Shop”
Decision: Balance AI-assisted creation while giving sanctity to the “untouched” places.
Initiatives like Magic Shop automatically selected photos and generated ready-to-buy products. The core challenge was determining how much automation users would trust when the output was deeply personal.
We tested variations of these “impulse buy” interfaces that merged commerce with photo personalization, and created internal guardrails. No merchandising in extremely personal areas, like the library, but if users explicitly want to use our “magic” tools we give them a great experience.
This work foreshadowed many of the trust questions now central to AI-driven products: when to automate, how to explain system intent, and where to preserve human agency.
Tradeoff:
Upside: Increased engagement and reduced creation friction
Risk: Eroding trust if automation felt opaque or presumptive
This balance between “magic” and control shaped how personalization and AI were introduced across the platform.
Decision:
Treat navigation structure as a first-order business input, not a cosmetic choice.
Navigation at Shutterfly directly shaped how users discovered products, promotions, and cobrands, especially during peak seasons. I partnered closely with merchandising to define:
Content Architecture
Which brands and cobrands to elevate or de-emphasize
How promotional content surfaced within navigation structures
These decisions had material impact on Q4 performance and annual revenue, making UX architecture inseparable from business outcomes.
These designs were reviewed with executive leadership due to their impact on revenue.
Navigation and Merchandising as a Revenue Lever
Tradeoff:
Upside: Improved discoverability and revenue alignment
Risk: Navigational changes carried immediate financial consequences if misjudged
This work reinforced navigation as a shared contract between UX and revenue, requiring precision, experimentation, and executive alignment.
Outcomes & Impact
Design’s Role
CSAT improvement
Revenue lift; Conversion gains
Q4 performance improvements through navigation changes
AA Accessibility
At this scale, design impact shows up less as growth spikes and more as stability, trust, and system durability over time.
Business and Organizational Outcomes
Platform coherence & componentization; reduced work
Clearer governance on AI-assisted personalized products
Systems that last beyond active investment
YOY Insights
Looking at the business over time gives insights about photos and the overall impact of design. In this case, the absence of regression is itself a signal. The photos platform absorbed billions of new assets while maintaining conversion, retention, and order volume, indicating a durable system that could evolve without eroding user confidence. The design team maintained trust and easy re-entry into a known, friendly place to document their family memories.
2016 annual report
2017 annual report
Leadership Outcomes
When I lead design for complex platforms, teams and organizations benefit in consistent, practical ways:
Teams operate with confidence and autonomy within shared constraints, allowing work to move in parallel while preserving a cohesive, trusted experience.
Rework and design drift are reduced across surfaces, as clear platform standards and decision frameworks make it easier to do the right thing the first time.
High-risk decisions are surfaced early and navigated thoughtfully, balancing long-term system health with real business needs and delivery pressure.
Executive partners gain a trusted UX counterpart, someone who can translate user impact into conversations about revenue, retention, and platform strategy.
Products evolve with durability over time, staying coherent and resilient well beyond launch as the organization, technology, and market change.