Enhancing Product Flow for SaveToBuy's Merchant Dashboard

SaveToBuy (STB) is a fintech platform that helps users save gradually toward big purchases, enabling merchants to offer flexible payment options and customers to buy smarter. The ecosystem includes a mobile app for users, a merchant dashboard for sellers, and an admin panel for operations all designed to simplify saving, purchasing, and managing payments in one place.

E-commerce products can be deceptively complex. Anyone who has ever handled product and product variation flows knows what I mean - it’s one of the trickiest parts of the field.

At SaveToBuy (STB), I often joke that designing user flows is the easy part. Structuring how those flows connect with APIs, back-end logic, and front-end presentation is the real challenge.

During one of our recent updates for the merchant dashboard, the team ran into a bottleneck. The “Add Product” flow, a seemingly simple feature, had become one of our biggest design debates. The designers struggled to align on how to best represent product variations and pricing logic while maintaining a clean, quick user experience.

As the Product Manager, I had already documented the PRD in detail, outlining all business rules, data points, and how the flow should behave. But even with that, interpretation gaps can happen, especially when multiple design ideas compete for clarity and we’re on a tight timeline.

At that point, my instinct as a former product designer kicked in. This wasn’t the moment to “teach” or correct; it was the moment to unblock the team. So I sketched and built out two quick flow variations to show what the stakeholders had in mind and what could technically work with the APIs we already had.

That small act of bridging clarity between what the client wanted and what the team could deliver saved us days of delay and gave the designers new context for refining the final flow. Over time, this same flow was further shortened and improved after user feedback and continues to be iterated on.

I don’t design where I product-manage, but I do design when it helps create clarity. This experience reminded me that great product management isn’t just about managing timelines or writing PRDs; it’s about removing friction between ideas and execution.

Helping the design team visualize intent wasn’t about control it was about communication. And sometimes, that’s the fastest way to move a product forward.