02 · 2025 · Logistics SaaS
Ship.com · Cross-platform unification that lifted NPS and reset the growth trajectory.
Led the post-acquisition redesign of Ship.com, turning two bolted-together platforms into a single seamless experience. Data-informed decisions and tight customer-feedback loops drove a +12 point NPS lift, signalled a market-share rebound, and set up the company’s next growth curve.
- +12 pts
- NPS lift post-launch
- Lead
- Product designer
- 6 mo
- redesign cycle
- 2025
- shipped
- Role
- Lead Product Designer
- Team
- Design + PM + 6 engineers
- Tags
- Post-acquisition · Cross-platform · Growth
Ship.com had just acquired a competing platform. On paper it was a growth play. In practice it was two products bolted together. Two onboarding flows, two pricing models, two ways of doing the same thing. And a customer base that was starting to notice. I was brought in to lead the redesign and find a way to merge the two into one seamless experience without losing what each had been good at.
The challenge
A fractured experience hiding inside a growing company.
The headline metrics looked healthy: revenue was up, the acquisition had landed, the press release had run. Underneath the surface, retention was wobbling. New customers were getting routed through one product, then bumped into a second one the moment they tried to do anything serious. Power users from the acquired platform were finding their workflows broken in subtle ways. Support tickets didn't spike. They just leaked, slowly.
I spent the first three weeks reading tickets, talking to AMs, and watching recordings. The pattern was clear: nobody was complaining about the merger because nobody outside the company knew there had been one. They were complaining that the product had gotten harder to use.
Approach
One product, two passes, every call backed by data and user voice.
I co-led a working group with the head of product and the eng leads from both original platforms. We built a unified information architecture first. A single way to think about shipments, batches, and labels regardless of which legacy product the customer had come from. Then we rebuilt the surface in two passes: a foundational pass that consolidated the two design systems, and a sequencing pass that re-ordered the experience around how customers actually worked rather than around how either platform had been built.
Every iteration was checked against real customer voices and instrumented data. We ran a small parallel beta with power users from each side of the merger, held a 30-minute open office hour every week for them to roast the work, and let the numbers narrow the call when opinions diverged. Most of the best decisions came out of those hours, and none of them got made on instinct alone.
Ship.com dashboard before redesign
Ship.com orders before redesign
Ship.com integrations before redesign
“Mergers happen in finance. They land in the design.”
Outcome
Seamless platform, +12 NPS, and the runway to grow.
Post-launch, the data and the user feedback agreed. Customers stopped noticing the merger had happened, because the surface they'd been complaining about (two products bolted together) now read as one. NPS lifted +12 points, support load on merger-related issue clusters dropped, and the AM team redirected from firefighting to expansion conversations.
The design did the work that financial integration alone couldn't. It smoothed out the kinks of a forced platform merge, where every "two ways of doing the same thing" turned back into one. That's what made the next move possible: with a unified product, the company was set up to recover share against competitors who'd treated the merger as an opening, and to grow into the next curve from a foundation that finally felt seamless to the customer.
Ship.com delivery settings before redesign
Ship.com live selling before redesign
Ship.com reports before redesign
Reflection
Post-acquisition redesigns are political before they are visual. The one thing I'd do again on every merger from here on out: spend the first month not designing. Spend it building a single language across both teams, instrumented hard enough that when opinions diverge, the data and the customer can settle it.