Peter Uzzi
Product + Design Leader
Designing a new Consumer vertical for Clover
Background
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Clover quickly launched online ordering to help merchants survive shutdowns. However, without a consumer-facing presence, adoption depended entirely on merchants promoting the tools themselves—leading to inconsistent engagement. Brought on as Principal Designer, I led the creation of a vision for Clover’s first consumer vertical. My focus was on uncovering unmet user needs, simplifying the consumer journey, and ensuring the product provided real value for both sides of the network—merchants and their customers.
Challenge & Task
My task was to increase consumer adoption and develop a rubric to measure adoption by. In addition to the challenges above, I helped the team identify other strategy and operations gaps:
Two-sided network complexity: Clover needed to deliver value to both merchants and consumers, without cannibalizing the core B2B platform.
Merchant-side promotion only with limited merchant-facing tools to drive engagement, leading to limited consumer awareness and merchant frustration.
Unclear monetization path for consumer retention and loyalty incentives, exacerbated by low trust due to lack of brand recognition.
High go-to-market costs with a saturated consumer market raised investment risk.
Planning & Strategy
I created a comprehensive, data-driven vision and project plan for a new Consumer vertical that supports Clover’s existing merchant ecosystem by:
Aligning stakeholders on the problem to be solved and recommended solution hypotheses across Product, Design, Engineering, and Finance.
Developed a clear project plan with milestones and KPIs.
Led strategy and definition workshops using frameworks from prior consulting work to align cross-functional teams.
Tested and validated consumer and merchant value propositions, monetization options, and behavioral hypotheses that informed my design recommendations.
I facilitated workshops to draw out organizational knowledge and help teams align.
Once teams and executives aligned on the problem to be solved, I engaged them in a design sprint where we sketched and prototyped possible solutions.
Storyboarding is a key tool to align teams quickly and solicit ideas from cross-functional stakeholders.
I employed rapid low-fidelity prototyping to crystalize storyboards into experiments.
Execution
Research & Design
Conducted discovery with merchants and consumers to understand unmet needs and usage barriers.
Synthesized data and insights, drafted service blueprints, and defined new value streams.
Ran Lean experiments and concept tests with Production users to validate solution hypotheses, prototyping in low and high fidelity.
Cross-functional Collaboration
Partnered with Engineering Architects to explore feasibility and technical dependencies.
Worked with Product and Finance to define incentive models, pricing approaches, and value exchange dynamics.
Storyboarded future-state consumer journeys to visualize business potential and articulate vision clearly at the executive level.
Product & Design Leadership
Drafted roadmap with prioritized user stories across merchant, consumer, and technical swimlanes.
Elevated the role of the Design program at Clover by demonstrating how research, experimentation, and storytelling can shape strategy.
Supported post-sprint synthesis and communicated outcomes to execs through clear, actionable insights.
In collaboration with my Product peers, I developed a rubric to measure customer adoption beyond activation and orders, but one that measured engagement with Clover merchants beyond engagement with the app.
After identifying and prototyping possible solutions, we interviewed and presented concepts to users. Card sorting is one of many helpful tools I employed in synthesizing our user feedback.
Working with Product and Technology teams, I uncovered gaps in our technical capabilities hindering us from delivering an ideal experience to users. I employed design storytelling to align executives and secure resources to test possible solutions.
Effective storytelling imagines a possible future, visualizing real consumer personas interacting with this future state.
This vision walks stakeholders through both the consumer and merchant journey.
After some promising in-product Lean experiments with Production users, I expanded the concept into a two-sided network service blueprint with sequenced acquisition, activation, and retention goals.
My research, story, concepts, and strategic vision above influenced later enhancements to merchant-facing tools and upgrade opportunities to premium Customer Engagement tools.
Solution & Impact
Helped merchants and consumers avoid investing in a product experience that testing showed would create friction and low adoption.
Validated critical gaps in usability and acquisition that would have hurt both merchants and end users.
Uncovered adjacent opportunities that led to new merchant-facing engagement tools, including a storefront CMS and scheduling/booking features that merchants now actively use.
Consumers benefited from simplified engagement flows and merchants gained new ways to connect directly with customers.
These user-focused insights guided Clover’s executives to a no-go decision for the consumer marketplace, saving millions in go-to-market costs while redirecting investment into solutions that met clearer user needs.
