Adding a continuity rewards program across a billion-clip ecosystem · DG Rewards
Dollar General needed Rewards — a continuity-based deal type — across every touchpoint from discovery to checkout, on three platforms, without fragmenting an ecosystem already serving a billion annual deal clips. So I designed the card system first, then the funnel.
Dollar General's deals ecosystem already served 12M monthly active users — digital coupons, Cash Back (via the Ibotta Performance Network), and DG Cash co-mingled in a single gallery driving over a billion annual clips. Thestackable wallet architecture I'd designed earlier made the system ready to absorb new deal types. The system was working.
Now the business wanted to add Rewards — a continuity-based deal type where customers earn by purchasing qualifying products over time (buy 3, get $2 back). Unlike one-time-clip coupons, Rewards needed to:
The risk: add a new deal type poorly and you fragment an experience millions depend on — across gallery, product listing, product detail, wallet, and checkout, on three platforms simultaneously.
Rather than designing screens for each touchpoint, I started with the card itself. The Rewards card had to be a self-contained component that could live in any context — a gallery tile, a product-page badge, a wallet stack, or a checkout summary — and communicate its state at a glance.
I defined three card constructs, each with a distinct progress visualization that made the earn mechanic immediately legible:
The card anatomy — vendor branding, savings headline, progress indicator, program icon, expiration — was governed by a single spec sheet that merchandising, art, and engineering could all build from.
With the card system defined, I mapped the full funnel. Each touchpoint answers a different question — "What's available?" → "Does this qualify?" → "How close am I?" → "What have I earned?" → "What am I redeeming?" — and the card adapts to each context while holding visual consistency.
The same card, adapting context to context — discovery in the gallery, qualification in the drawer and product detail, earned value in the wallet, redemption at checkout.
Rewards was delivered production-ready for Phase 2 launch — a complete deal type integrated across the entire shopping funnel, built on an ecosystem already proving its effectiveness at scale.
Rewards extended an ecosystem already operating at scale:
Rewards could have been a standalone feature — its own section, its own flow, its own visual language. Faster to ship, easier to scope. But it would have fractured a shopping experience millions of customers already relied on.
The decision that mattered most wasn't any individual screen — it was the commitment to make Rewards a native citizen of the existing ecosystem: discoverable through the same patterns customers knew, traceable through the same wallet they trusted, redeemable through the same checkout they'd already learned.
"Shipping a feature is easy. Earning the right to live inside someone else's workflow — that's the real design problem."