Santévet's breeder portal was working — but quietly underperforming a channel that drives a real share of acquisition. Together with our B2B Product Marketing Lead, I ran a 45-day end-to-end discovery to understand why, and rebuilt the strategy from the ground up.
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Role
Design Engineer
Products
B2B End to End
Dates
2025-2026
Turning an admin portal into the heart of the breeder relationship.
A working portal, quietly underperforming.
Breeders are one of Santévet's most consistent acquisition channels — 85% of them already recommend the brand to puppy buyers. But the portal they used had been built years ago as an administrative tool: a place to file paperwork, not a service that connected breeders to their adopters. The system worked. It just wasn't producing what it could.
Three structural issues kept it that way: a legacy tech base that resisted change, an onboarding flow that depended on manual operations, and an activation moment — the most critical handoff in the customer journey — that fell entirely on the breeder, in the rush of an adoption.
A 45-day mixed-method study, co-led with our B2B Product Marketing Lead.
6 qualitative interviews with breeders surfaced the lived experience: friction at activation, demand for delegation, expectation of post-sale data, and a recurring desire for visible recognition as a Santévet partner. 86 quantitative responses confirmed and weighted those insights — 85% already recommend, 70% want simpler tools, top expectations clustered around adoption kits, communication support, and claim data.
We then re-examined a previous partnership (Royal Canin, 2019) to extract what had worked and what hadn't — co-branding built trust, the 3-step landing page funnel converted, but the model was too B2C and didn't valorize the prescriber. Useful precedent, clear lessons.
From admin tool to service.
"Breeders are massively in favor of the product — but the experience makes them feel like administrators rather than prescribers."
The portal was an admin tool where a service was needed. I reframed the product strategy around a single pivot: the moment of animal handover becomes the center of gravity. That's where conversion, breeder credibility, and adopter trust all converge — and that's where the previous product failed hardest.
Three horizons, one direction.
From the reframing, I structured a three-horizon roadmap — sequenced by impact, dependency, and team capacity.
Remove friction at activation (QR code, deferred mode, adopter-driven flow). Ship a physical adoption kit. Begin digitalizing the handoff.
Rebuild the breeder portal end-to-end. Launch a "Santévet Partner Breeder" label. Automate back-office financial flows.
Expand to Switzerland (recurring demand from breeders). Build a full ecosystem of breeder services. Implement automated CRM nurturing from D+0 to D+85, post-handover.
From strategy to shipped surfaces.
Phase 1 (discovery and strategy) shipped in October 2025. Phase 2 (build) is in active development — I prototyped key flows in code, with Claude as a coding partner, to give engineering and stakeholders something clickable to align around within days rather than weeks. The full product is being built against that prototype as the reference.