Stage
User Action
CRE property signs with Cubbi. Office tenants are contacted directly — if interested, transferred to AM.
AM calls admin, runs intro, and collects requirements over the phone — no form, no standard structure.
Admin describes what they need. AM translates into internal language and passes to whoever is available on the product team.
Product team configures benefits manually. Admin waits with no status update, no confirmation, no timeline.
Any change to the employee list — adding, removing, reassigning, offboarding — required contacting Cubbi. Admins could not manage benefit assignments themselves.
Admin waits to see if benefits are actually used — no orders feed, no utilization data, no confirmation that setup landed with employees.
Emotion
Passive, uninvolved
Uncertain, reliant
Confused
Waiting, powerless
Frustrated, blocked
In the dark
Pain Point (Before)
No self-service onboarding. All communication was locked on AM — admin had no portal, no visibility, no direct access.
No standard intake process. Requirements were captured ad-hoc on a call, with no form, no confirmation, and no shared terminology.
Sales used one set of terms, AM used another, the product team used a third. No shared language existed — concepts like "subsidy", "coupon", "discount" meant different things to each team.
Anyone available on the product team configured benefits manually. Process took 2–7 days. Admin received no notification when done — and had no way to verify the setup was correct.
Admins could add employees to the system but couldn't assign them to a benefit. Every assignment required contacting AM again.
Admin had no visibility into whether benefits were live or being used — no utilization data, no orders feed, no confirmation the setup worked. The only signal was employees occasionally asking what the benefit was.
Design Response
Credit Dashboard created as the first external-facing business interface.
Self-service onboarding scoped and kicked off — AM still handled intake at the time, but research made removing the bottleneck a clear next priority, especially to unlock scale.
Unified terminology defined with all internal teams before UI was built; applied consistently throughout.
40 fields → 12 essential inputs via progressive disclosure, one section at a time.
Admins gained full self-service control over the employee list — creating benefits and managing who is assigned to them, end-to-end, without contacting Cubbi.
Self-service reporting and spend visibility built into the dashboard.
