Zomato
2025
HMW help investors seamlessly track & manage all smallcase subscriptions?
Responsibility
Lead product designer
and core UX architecture
Team
3 Designers, 2 Product Managers,
12+ Engineers
Time
Jan - April, 2025
Introduction
As smallcase grew, users increasingly subscribed to multiple advisor but had no single place to see, manage, or exit those subscriptions. Control was fragmented across advisor microsites, emails, and memory, creating anxiety around money and frequent accidental renewals.
This wasn’t a usability gap; it was an ownership gap—users were committing money on an ongoing basis without a clear system to understand or control that commitmen
Design outcome
We redesigned the OMS to support faster decisions and multi-outlet scale. With better visibility, staff responded quicker, and owners gained control across kitchens reducing delays, errors, and app switching.
The pilot validated the core bet: lower cognitive load = more reliable operations
300k
adoption for subscription management within 6 months
24%
~24% increase in annual fixed revenueadherence
65%
Reduction in subscription related tickets
33%
Increase in cross-outlet adoption after rollout
Solution Overview
Why this problem mattered
Subscriptions are core to smallcase’s revenue model and advisor ecosystem. While investing flows were robust, subscription management remained opaque and support-heavy. This created three risks:
User trust risk: accidental renewals and unclear cancellations
Revenue risk: churn driven by frustration, not intent
Operational risk: high support dependency for basic billing needs
Subscriptions were effectively advisor-owned flows. Fixing this meant redesigning the system, not polishing individual screens.
Core insight
The system worked only when nothing went wrong, an unacceptable assumption in a financial product.
Each smallcase manager operated via an independent microsite
Cancellation depended on memory rather than clarity
Users had to remember where they subscribed
Billing records were scattered across emails
What users were struggling with
I interviewed 50+ active subscribers (single- and multi-manager) to understand behavioral and emotional friction, not just surface usability issues
👩🏾🍳
Kitchen staff
Users had no single source of truth.
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Outlet managers
Cancellations were easy to forget and expensive to miss
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Multi Outlet Owner
Invoices were buried in inboxes or locked behind support tickets
Defining the problem
HMW help users seamlessly track and manage all smallcase subscriptions at one place?
Design goals
Subscription issues showed up as renewals, invoices, and cancellations—but the underlying problem was systemic: users lacked clear ownership over an ongoing financial commitment.The goal was to make subscriptions understandable, controllable, and trustworthy across their full lifecycle, while reducing revenue leakage and operational load for the business.
We optimized for
Clear ownership of all subscriptions, active or inactive
Predictable billing and renewal behaviour
Reduced dependency on support through clarity by design
Billing records were scattered across emails
trade-offs:
Less advisor level flexibility to gain platform trust
Building shared infrastructure increased upfront engineering cost, but simplified future monetization features.Predictable billing and renewal behaviour
Making cancellation easier risked short-term revenue loss, but reduced accidental churn and support-driven dissatisfaction.Billing records were scattered across emails
Design Highlights
The work focused on turning subscriptions into a reliable system, not a set of screens. Each change addressed a failure in ownership, predictability, or accountability across the lifecycle.
Desgin goal : Flexible
All subscriptions, one view
Problem
Subscriptions were fragmented across advisor microsites, forcing users to remember where control lived and making oversight fragile.
Solution
A single, user-owned source of truth for all subscriptions—shifting ownership from advisors to the platform and restoring control.
Design goal : Flexible
Proactive renewal signaling
Problem
A single, user-owned source of truth for all subscriptions—shifting ownership from advisors to the platform and restoring control.
Solution
Early, explicit renewal signals that made continuation a conscious choice, not an accident.
Desgin goal : Actionable
Financial traceability as a first-class capabilityal Info Always Within Sight
Problem
Scattered invoices made it hard for users to verify past payments, weakening confidence in billing accuracy.
Solution
A single, always-available record of past and upcoming charges—removing reliance on support for financial clarity.
Desgin goal : Actionable
Designing the exit as a first-class system behavior
Problem
Unclear cancellation outcomes made exits feel risky, discouraging trust and pushing users to support.
Solution
A predictable exit model that clearly separated access, billing, and investments—making leaving safe and explicit.
Desgin goal : Actionable
Closing the loop on subscription exits
Problem
Cancellation reasons were invisible, leaving churn drivers unclear and decisions intuition-led
Solution
Structured exit feedback captured at the moment of cancellation to inform product, pricing, and advisor quality.
Reflections
This project reshaped how I think about monetization UX.
Subscription systems are not retention tools—they are trust systems. By shifting ownership from fragmented advisor surfaces to user-owned infrastructure, we reduced support load, improved renewal confidence, and set a precedent for how future paid features were designed at smallcase.
