Mission Control: Standardising how 13 markets create Upsize Cashback

Role

Product design manager, led the design

Team

1 product designer, 2 product managers, 1 business processes manager and an engineering team, with operations teams across 13 markets

Stack

• 
• 
• 

Outcome

923 man-days saved a year across 13 markets, a figure the General Manager and project lead validated

The shift

Each of ShopBack's 13 markets ran its campaigns and merchant opportunities out of its own Google Sheets. The goal was one way of working across every market, so the process is easy to audit and a new market can join without building sheets of its own. Upsize Cashback, called an upsize from here on, is an extra cashback rate on top of the baseline the affiliate network pays, funded by the merchant. Backstage it starts as an opportunity that Business Development pitches to the merchant, and once the opportunity is approved, an upsize is created.

What made it hard

• Root cause: Each market built its own sheets, with its own file names, structure, layouts and packages. Singapore's campaign calendar ran to 30+ tabs, Hong Kong's to 20+ and Australia's to 50+, and the other markets kept their own too. Years of this left no consistent, clean data.
• Consequence: Each market ran things differently, so the process was hard to audit. The work ran on copy and paste, and one deleted space could break a sheet. Nobody could see packages and upsizes across campaigns, and a fix in one market never reached the others.
• Constraint: The obvious question was why not use AI from the start. With no consistent, clean data for it to work from, the platform had to come first. Eight downstream systems, from rates and cashback tiers to Salesforce and Braze, had to keep working, and the rollout could not be a switch.

What I did

13 markets, one way of working, one platform.

I led the design of Mission Control, the operating system for campaigns and opportunities. Marketing, Business Development, Operations, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and the General Manager put information in. It syncs with the downstream systems, automates the steps after approval and shows everyone the same picture. It launched on 30 May 2025. It has five modules:

• Campaign calendar, a single source of truth for every campaign, big or small, so everyone's planning is straightforward.
• Commercial management, a guided form that leaves little room for error, plus autofilled templates that make pitching faster.
• CRM and marketing, push notifications and emails that automatically sync with Braze when an opportunity is approved.
• Content Platform Next (CP Next), a drag-and-drop builder for app and web campaign pages, each starting from the calendar with its opportunities in place.
• Template manager, a library of banner templates pulled straight from Figma and ready to use in CP Next, so banners stay consistent without a redesign each time.

The rollout case was time saved, and Google Sheets was retired for the work that moved. At launch only one product line moved, and some upsizes had to be migrated during the overlap. The plan brought briefings and trainings forward and gave each market its own migration plan.

What changed

• 923 man-days saved a year across 13 markets, a figure the General Manager and project lead validated.
• About S$370k in annual productivity value, and about 60% efficiency improvement across all scoped workflows.
• Teams get one calendar, a guided opportunity form and automatic downstream booking in place of a set of sheets per market.
• A foundational move to an AI-first approach, as engineering built AI bots and Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools that help teams triage, understand and create items in Mission Control.