BestGift — Service Design for Scalable Operations

Redesigning the end-to-end service to increase capacity, reduce lead time variability, and strengthen operational resilience

Project Snapshot

Company / Product: BestGift — end-to-end service + operations redesign

Timeline: 2024 (full year)

Role: Service Design lead

Stakeholders: Purchasing, Production, Sales, Leadership

Scope (What I led): discovery + workflow audit, service blueprint (current → future), redesigning backstage ops + handoffs, improving system adoption & routines

Outcomes: capacity +35–40%, lead time ~12 → ~8 days, errors ~15% → ~5%, ~R$25k/month savings (engraving internalization)

Confidentiality: Some metrics are rounded; satisfaction/engagement figures are illustrative where noted.

Summary

In 2024, BestGift was growing fast, but the operation behind it wasn’t keeping up. Sales were increasing, but delivery times were inconsistent, costs were rising, and the team lacked visibility into where the real bottlenecks were.

I started by working directly with the founders to understand their perception of the problem, then expanded the discovery to the full operation. Through interviews and process mapping, I uncovered that the main issues were not isolated, but systemic — involving dependencies on external suppliers, lack of operational visibility, and underused internal systems.

Using service blueprinting, I mapped the entire end-to-end operation, making invisible processes and bottlenecks visible for the first time. This created a shared understanding across the company and enabled clear decision-making.

From this, we redesigned key parts of the service: reducing dependency on third parties by internalizing engraving, improving system adoption for sales and operations, and introducing an e-commerce layer to align customer expectations with real stock and delivery capacity.

Context

A large part of the operation depended on external suppliers for product customization, especially engraving. This introduced delays, increased costs, and reduced control over quality and delivery timelines.

At the same time, sales relied heavily on manual processes, with limited visibility into lead generation, pipeline, and actual product availability.

My Role

I led the service design initiative end-to-end, starting from discovery with founders and expanding into interviews across purchasing, production, sales, and operations.

A key part of my work was mapping the real workflow — not how it was documented, but how it actually happened — identifying gaps, bottlenecks, and hidden dependencies.

I translated this into a full service blueprint (current → future state), which became the foundation for decision-making and operational redesign.

The problem

The core issue was not growth itself, but the lack of alignment between sales, operations, and delivery capability.

Critical steps relied on external suppliers, internal systems were underutilized, and teams operated with limited visibility and coordination.

Goals

Instead of optimizing isolated steps, I focused on making the entire service visible and actionable.

The service blueprint revealed that the main constraint was not production capacity itself, but the variability introduced by external dependencies and lack of operational control.

From this, the approach prioritized:

Constraints and approach

The work needed to improve performance while operations continued running at full pace. Instead of optimizing isolated tasks, the approach was to define the service end-to-end, identify where customer expectations disconnected from operational reality, and then focus on interventions that reduced the highest-impact constraints.

Key service design decisions:

Key improvements (service design highlights)

The improvements focused on reducing operational variability, increasing control over critical steps, and improving visibility across the service.

A key turning point was identifying that engraving — handled by third-party suppliers — was the main source of delay, cost variability, and quality inconsistency. This step introduced an average delay of several days and created a dependency that the company could not control.

Based on this insight, the company decided to internalize the engraving process by investing in its own equipment. This significantly improved production control, reduced delivery time, and lowered operational costs.

Another important improvement was increasing the adoption of the existing operational system. Instead of introducing new tools, I helped structure how the team could use the current system to track leads, monitor production, and improve coordination between sales and operations. This created better visibility and reduced reliance on informal communication.

Finally, we introduced the foundation for an e-commerce experience, allowing customers to access product availability and stock information directly. This reduced dependency on manual sales interactions and helped align customer expectations with real delivery capacity.

Together, these changes reduced variability across the service, improved coordination between teams, and created a more scalable operational model.

Outcomes

What this demonstrates

This project demonstrates my ability to work at the intersection of design, operations, and business strategy.

It shows how I identify systemic problems, make complex operations visible, and drive changes that impact not only user experience, but cost structure, scalability, and business performance.