Context
SevenSeas operates a Card-as-a-Service (CAAS) platform that lets financial institutions and program managers issue and manage payment cards. The existing tooling had grown organically over years: back-office operations relied on manual steps, the admin experience was fragmented, and cardholders lacked a modern self-service portal. As transaction volumes and client onboarding grew, the platform needed to scale without scaling the operations team with it.
The challenge
- Modernize the admin portal so operations staff could manage cards, users, and programs without engineering support.
- Deliver a cardholder portal that reduced support tickets by making common actions self-service.
- Do all of this on a live, regulated platform where downtime and errors carry real financial and compliance consequences.
My role
I owned the product end to end: discovery with operations and client stakeholders, functional specification documents (FSDs) with exhaustive Given/When/Then acceptance criteria, backlog prioritization, sprint planning, and acceptance testing. I acted as the single point of contact between the client's business team and the development team, translating regulatory and operational constraints into buildable requirements.
Before development started on key screens, I built interactive HTML prototypes with AI-assisted tooling and validated them directly with stakeholders. Layout disputes, missing fields, and workflow gaps were caught in prototype reviews instead of in sprint demos, protecting sprint capacity for real build work.
Approach
- Specification discipline. Every feature shipped with a complete FSD: user stories, flat declarative acceptance criteria, edge cases, and validation rules, giving developers and QA one shared source of truth.
- Admin user management. Designed role-based access, user lifecycle flows, and audit-friendly controls so client admins could safely delegate work.
- In-app platform communication. Specified a back-office communication system so the platform could notify operators and cardholders inside the product instead of over email.
- Audit trail viewer. Defined a full audit trail feature so every sensitive action was traceable, supporting both compliance reviews and dispute resolution.
- Test coverage. Wrote comprehensive test suites for delivered features, tightening the loop between acceptance criteria and QA execution.
Outcomes
The modernized portals became the foundation for the next phase of the platform: a cross-platform cardholder application, covered in the next case study.