Summary
Boston Beer Co. faced operational friction, financial risk, and customer woes due to fragmented claims processes spanning 5+ internal departments and serving 400+ distributors.
Heavy reliance on spreadsheets, email chains, and manual data management caused delayed credits, leading to financial uncertainty and warehouse friction for distributors. They also risked inaccurately or over-crediting distributors and tax compliance, and caused friction across internal coworker workflows.
As the solo design lead on a cross-functional team, I grounded the design and multi-release sequencing of Boston Beer’s web-based Claims platform in continuous user research and usability testing, bridging the gap between real distributor and internal staff behavior and business requirements. I helped clarify assumptions early, navigate ambiguity, and work through top-down headwinds to deliver easily-adoptable solutions and de-risk each release for minimal operational disruption.
✅ Our Wins
We established an extensible B2B claims platform foundation with state-based information architecture, tracking and role-based workflows, built-in compliance, and in-line validation.
4+
Legacy tools replaced
3,400+
Live claims processed
29%
Faster claim credit processing
$706k+
Federal tax credits safeguarded
($340K risk-free)
Also, we laid the groundwork to de-risk delivery, adoption, and scale for 7+ claim types and 6,000+ annual claims.
A distributor's open claims list, offering visibility of their claims actively being processed for credit.
A BBC user's open claims list, offering visibility of claim processing states for all distributors' destruction claims.
A BBC user enters required information to record the request they prepared and will submit for tax credit approval.
A BBC user skips an approval step and forfeits tax credit to continue processing the claim without further delay.
A distributor's open claims list, offering visibility of their claims actively being processed for credit.
A BBC user's open claims list, offering visibility of claim processing states for all distributors' destruction claims.
A BBC user enters required information to record the request they prepared and will submit for tax credit approval.
A BBC user skips an approval step and forfeits tax credit to continue processing the claim without further delay.
