We had a naming and structure problem. The rewards ecosystem had grown incrementally—one product at a time—and it showed. Some incentives had names. Others didn't. Some lived under the program umbrella; others floated. Users who earned through one payment method had a coherent experience; users who earned through another had no mental model for what they were participating in.
This is an exploration of three ways to restructure it, and a recommendation for which one solves the problem.
Figure out how the program should organize and position its different products under one coherent system.
Understand how the taxonomy—including what we name things—shifts depending on which structural model we choose.
How we'd been doing it. The named program had a clear identity, but only for users earning through debit and balance. Credit card and crypto incentives had no label, no home, and no relationship to anything else in the ecosystem. Users earning through those methods had nothing to call what they were doing.
The problem isn't the named product. It's that it doesn't stretch far enough.
Better—everything is under one umbrella and nothing is unlabeled. But organizing by payment method mirrors how the product is built, not how users think about it. Nobody opens the rewards hub looking for "Pay with Debit." They're looking for cash back. The incentive is what they want; the payment method is how they get there.
Resolves the fragmentation problem. Creates a new one.
Cash Back becomes the organizing concept—not because we're introducing a new product, but because it's already what ties debit, credit, balance, and crypto together in users' minds. Once "Cash Back" is the featured category, all four payment methods can live under it without requiring users to know anything about how the product is structured.
Offers and Enhancements give the hub room to grow. New reward types slot in without breaking the hierarchy. New promotional mechanics fit into Enhancements without needing a structural overhaul.
This is the only model that fully solves both problems—the unlabeled products from Exploration 1 and the product-centric structure from Exploration 2. Organizing by incentive type rather than payment method matches how users approach the rewards hub: they want to earn cash back, not to manage their debit card settings.
Using the program name as the umbrella across all products creates the consistent system we couldn't get by applying it to just one sub-product. It also means we can label everything else descriptively underneath it, which makes the hierarchy easier to extend over time.
The Offers and Enhancements categories are intentionally modular. Promotions, boosts, referrals—anything that doesn't fit neatly into Cash Back—have a home that can grow without requiring a rename or restructure down the road.