Upgrade Cross-Sell
Connected prequalified customers from other Upgrade products to trusted contractors within the Home Improvement network, with around 1,500 users submitting a home project request 3 months after launch.
Overview
Upgrade serves a large, active customer base across credit cards, personal loans, auto financing, and banking. Home Improvement is Upgrade’s contractor financing platform that enables contractors to offer financing for renovation projects. With an established customer ecosystem already in place, this created an opportunity to introduce Home Improvement financing to customers already engaged with Upgrade.
In 2025, one of our growth objectives was to introduce Home Improvement to existing Upgrade users by integrating home renovation financing into their current product experience. I addressed this by designing a cohesive flow that enabled homeowners to become prequalified and connect with local contractors, while giving contractors a new channel to convert qualified leads into customers.
Platform
Web-app
(Mobile & Desktop)
Timeline
Jul 2025 - Sep 2025
Team
1 Product Designer (Me)
1 Product Manager
3 FE Engineers
Primary Tools
Figma
Userlytics
Heap & Tableau
Initial Discovery
Internal data showed that renovation demand already existed within Upgrade’s ecosystem. In 2024, 85,000 cardholders actively spent in the home renovation category. Despite this demand, Home Improvement wasn't surfaced within the existing product experience, revealing an opportunity to address renovation intent in-platform.
Strategy
Because I was designing this experience from the ground up, I focused on defining how the interaction should feel and flow for both homeowners and merchants.
See their pre-qualified amount for project financing
Find trusted contractors nearby
Share their contact information with contractors they choose
Obtain access to interested homeowners
Skip manual data entry using saved customer information
See upfront how much a homeowner qualifies for
Goal
My goal is to design a cohesive flow that surfaces renovation financing to existing users, enables homeowners to browse and select preferred contractors, and equips contractors with a list of prequalified leads they can directly connect with. By aligning homeowner and contractor needs, this seamless experience will bring qualified users into the Home Improvement network, creating new opportunities for contractors to convert leads into customers.
Process
Market Research
I found that approximately 80% of Upgrade users outside of Home Improvement primarily access the platform on mobile. Based on this behavior, I prioritized a mobile-first approach for the customer-facing experience.
With Home Improvement being a new cross-sell initiative, I researched how people find and hire service professionals online. I reviewed platforms like Modernize, Angi, Expedia, Taskrabbit, and Thumbtack to understand what users prioritize when searching, comparing, and booking services.
At the same time, Home Improvement needed to feel native to Upgrade. I studied Upgrade's existing Auto Loan cross-sell flow to understand how users are guided through financing within the dashboard. This allowed the new Home Improvement flow to align with established behaviors and interaction patterns.
Market Research - Key Patterns
Customer Experience - Initial Designs
Using research insights, I translated key patterns into an initial end-to-end flow. Beginning at the Upgrade dashboard, I introduced a contractor exploration experience with scannable list cards and an optional map view, enabling homeowners to quickly compare contractors by category, ratings, and proximity.
Initial high-fidelity customer experience designs
While designing the experience, a key question emerged: should homeowners get pre-qualified first, or explore contractors first? To better understand how to drive pre-qualification, I designed and tested two flow variations:
Flow A - Pre-Qualify First
Homeowners enter pre-qualification before browsing contractors, helping them see their financing amount upfront and move through the flow more efficiently.
Flow B - Explore Contractors First
Homeowners browse contractors before pre-qualifying, allowing them to evaluate services and build trust before sharing financial details.
To evaluate both flow variations, I ran unmoderated usability testing with 6 participants on Userlytics. In addition to comparing performance between flows, the sessions revealed broader patterns in how homeowners build trust and navigate the experience.
Design question
User Insight
Do users trust sharing their pre-qualified amount upfront?
Users hesitated to disclose budget early, fearing price inflation. They preferred browsing contractors before sharing financial details.
What helps build contractor credibility and trust?
Ratings, review count, and location were the strongest trust signals. Users did not care too much about proximity or “Projects completed with Upgrade”
Which browsing pattern feels more intuitive: List View or Map View?
List View was preferred for structured comparison. Map View was secondary for confirming location.
Based on these findings, I determined that the most cohesive experience allows homeowners to browse contractors without immediately sharing financial details, while keeping pre-qualification accessible whenever they’re ready. This approach reduces friction while supporting cross-sell conversion.
With this in mind, I worked with stakeholders to break the homeowner experience into 3 clear stages:
Introduce home renovation financing within the Upgrade dashboard
Make homeowners aware that home improvement financing is available directly within their existing Upgrade experience.
Help homeowners find the right contractor with confidence
Enable quick filtering and side-by-side comparison by renovation type, ratings, and location, helping homeowners narrow their search and choose with confidence.
Make pre-qualification easy and flexible
Allow homeowners to get pre-qualified upfront or explore contractors first, with a seamless path into pre-qualification whenever they’re ready.
Contractor Experience - Previous Version
While designing the homeowner flow, I also explored how to evolve the merchant experience. Back then, the Home Improvement merchant dashboard did not support tracking leads (aka potential sales!). This led me to partner with stakeholders to conduct informal interviews with 4 Home Improvement contractors to understand their current lead acquisition process and what they would need to manage leads directly within their dashboard.
Previous Merchant Dashboard
After speaking with contractors, a few needs became clear:
Contractors wanted a dedicated leads experience that wouldn’t disrupt their existing customer project view.
They needed the ability to track, organize, and prioritize interested leads.
It would also make sense that contractors could initiate loan applications directly from their lead dashboard. From a business perspective, this tool would expedite the process for merchants and drive new loan originations.
With these insights, I designed the contractor experience in parallel with the homeowner flow to create a cohesive marketplace experience. Since nearly 90% of contractors operate on desktop, I prioritized a desktop-first approach.
Help contractors manage qualified leads
Added a dedicated Leads section to help contractors manage pre-qualified homeowners. Contractors can quickly scan key details, view contact information, and move leads forward without interrupting active projects.
Give contractors visibility into lead progress
Contractors can update lead status after contact, making it easier to track progress and prioritize next steps directly within the platform.
Streamline the loan application process
Contractors can initiate loan applications directly from leads, with pre-filled customer information to reduce manual entry and accelerate loan origination.
Finalized Homeowner & Contractor Experience
The video below shows an example of the cross-sell journey across both the homeowner and contractor experiences.
Takeaways
Results Summary
Three months after launch, about 1,500 users submitted home project requests through the Home Improvement Cross-Sell flow.
Since this is a new cross-platform experience, we are still tracking how many of these leads move forward to open a loan application. Because renovation decisions with financing can take 2-8+ weeks depending on project size, we’re reviewing conversion rates over a longer period to better reflect the typical contractor sales cycle.
Challenges
Building trust while meeting compliance requirements
Introducing pre-qualification and renovation financing required balancing legal constraints with clear, user-friendly language. Because the process involved sharing personal information, I partnered closely with Marketing and Legal to refine the messaging and clearly convey how customer data would be shared. Although this extended timelines, it ultimately strengthened our ability to communicate transparently without compromising compliance.
Aligning across multiple teams and products
Home Improvement is a separate product experience, and integrating it with the existing Upgrade dashboard required ongoing coordination across teams and roadmaps. Although alignment required multiple iterations, it encouraged cross-team partnership and improved integration across the platform.
Next Steps
As one of our first in-product lead initiatives, Cross-Sell connects our contractor network with customers already using Upgrade. Over time, we plan to expand Cross-Sell by introducing a paid “Featured Contractor” option, allowing contractors to promote their business and stand out among others. Additionally, the contractor exploration feature could eventually be made available to non-Upgrade users who are exploring home renovation financing.