“The forecast is wrong — the skill is knowing which direction it's wrong in before it proves you right.”
Janine Schmidt, Merchant Operations Manager
- 01
What's the biggest shift in how you work over the last year?
Merchant onboarding used to be a manual handholding process — email chains, document collection, back-and-forth on deal setup. Now 70% of that is handled by an agentic workflow that guides the merchant through setup, validates their inputs, and only escalates to me when something genuinely needs human judgment. My team handles three times the merchant volume at the same staffing level.
- 02
Walk me through a problem you solved using AI that you couldn't have tackled the same way before.
We had a segment of merchants — independent restaurants in secondary markets — with activation rates significantly below our overall average. I ran an analysis over their onboarding support tickets and discovered a pattern: they were confused by the same three steps in our deal-creation flow. I worked with product to add contextual help at those specific steps. Activation for that segment improved 28% in ninety days without any staffing change.
- 03
What makes this different from any other company you've worked at?
Merchant operations here is not about managing a queue. It's about designing the system that keeps the queue from forming. I'm expected to identify the upstream problems that generate downstream tickets and fix them at the source. That requires a different kind of thinking than most operations roles I've had — more analytical, more systems-oriented. I find it more interesting.
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Building across engineering, product, data, sales, ops, finance, and people. Every role is an Operator role.
We get people offline through quality local experiences at great value. That's still the mission. Everything above is what it takes to deliver it in 2026.