BrickLink Catalog Contribution
A service design project helping BrickLink’s product team make sense of its complex catalog contribution ecosystem during replatforming. I audited the process firsthand, created a multi-layer service blueprint, facilitated workshops, and translated fragmented pain points into prioritized opportunities that supported clearer roadmap planning.
What is BrickLink?
Service Design
The Challenge
Contributor challenge：
New contributors faced a long and fragmented process with multiple entry points, unclear next steps, and approval dependencies that made it hard to know how to continue.
Internal product team challenge：
PM and engineers had limited shared visibility into how contributor actions connected to admin review workflows and backend dependencies.
Replatforming challenge:
The team is having a hard time to prioritize improvements without redesigning the entire contribution process at once.
Why This Matters
The catalog contribution process is how BrickLink’s community helps maintain the accuracy and completeness of the marketplace. Every contribution adds or improves the data that sellers, buyers, collectors, and internal teams rely on.
Phase 1: Experiencing the process firsthand
I started by going through the catalog contribution process myself, completing an inventory contribution for a set and documenting each step with screenshots.
This helped me experience the process as a first-time contributor and identify where the product relied on prior knowledge, unclear instructions, or external support.
Phase 2: Mapping the contributor journey
After completing the process, I mapped the contributor journey to clarify the sequence of actions, entry points, decision points, approval dependencies, and noted the pain points that I was experiencing. This created the foundation for the service blueprint and gave the team a shared view of what contributors experience on the surface.
Phase 3: Facilitating backend discovery
To build the internal layers of the service blueprint, I facilitated workshops with PM and engineers to uncover the admin and backend processes behind each contributor-facing step.
Since much of the workflow knowledge was spread across team members, and parts of the codebase were older and less familiar to the current team, the workshops helped clarify how submissions were reviewed, where system dependencies existed, and how approval logic shaped the contributor experience.
Phase 4: Building the full service blueprint
This is just a snapshot of one part of the whole blueprint*
Phase 5: Identifying pain points & gain points
After the service blueprint was created, I led the team through a workshop to review each touchpoint and identify pain points, gain points, and opportunity areas. I organized these insights into a touchpoint chart that was broken down into each step in the process.
Phase 6: Translating insights into priorities
Then based on our discussion, I synthesized them into priority groups: high-priority opportunities, quick wins, mid-to-low priority improvements, and areas for future exploration.
To connect the work back to replatforming, I reviewed the team’s existing roadmap and OKRs to understand where contribution-related improvements could realistically fit.
In the final workshop, the team used an impact-effort matrix to compare opportunities and decide which improvements were most actionable.
Outcomes
What the work enabled
A concrete foundation for roadmap and replatforming decisions.
Helped stakeholders compare opportunities by impact, effort, and feasibility.
A shared reference point for future product, engineering, and admin alignment.
More incremental scoping, instead of redesigning the entire flow at once.
Feedback
Key Insights & Reflections
Strengthened my cross-functional facilitation skills
Guided product managers and engineers through workshops to uncover distributed process knowledge, clarify assumptions, and align on how the system actually worked behind the scenes.Grew my service design thinking beyond the user journey
Realized the contributor experience could not be improved by looking at front-end touchpoints alone. It required understanding review workflows, approval logic, backend constraints, and internal ownership.Learned to translate complexity into roadmap-ready action
Helped break a large replatforming challenge into smaller opportunity areas, making it easier for the team to compare priorities, identify quick wins, and scope future improvements incrementally.
