Petco Love Lost
Building and Scaling a National Pet Reunification Platform
The Problem
Every year, 1 in 3 pets go missing in the U.S.
Reunification is often time-sensitive, fragmented, and dependent on manual search across disconnected systems. Petco Love Lost was built to centralize lost and found reporting, leverage photo-matching technology, and increase the likelihood of reunions at national scale.
Today the platform supports:
500K+ searchable pets
180K+ successful reunions
437K+ monthly active users
3.2K+ shelter partners
My focus: increase reunions, scale acquisition, and strengthen user trust
My Role
Senior Product Designer
My role has been to design not only interfaces, but a scalable reunification product ā aligning user experience, machine learning capabilities, and systems to drive measurable mission-based outcomes.
Scope Included:
Leading multi-site ecosystem design (Petco Love, Lost, Care, Adopt)
End-to-end UX strategy & execution
Establishing qualitative and quantitative research practices
Influencing roadmap prioritization
Managing design contractor and copywriter
Driving KPI-aligned optimization
Assumed PM functions during transition period
The Challenge
When I joined Petco Love, the opportunity wasnāt just a redesign ā it was a chance to build a mission-critical product for national scale.
Product Gaps
Limited research discipline
Fragmented information architecture
High friction reporting and search flows
No experimentation framework
Inconsistent and inaccessible UX patterns
Organizational Context
Lean team, tight resources
Growing national ambition
Multiple stakeholders (pet parents, finders, shelters)
Increasing demand for measurable KPI growth
Establishing the Foundation
Introducing Research & Validation
I operationalized research for the product, implementing:
Moderated usability testing with shelters
Unmoderated testing with pet parents
A/B testing and quantitative validation
Funnel and behavioral analysis
This reduced subjective prioritization and grounded roadmap decisions in data.
Rebuilding Core Architecture
Over time, I restructured:
Search and filtering systems
Reporting workflows
Navigation hierarchy
Cross-platform consistency
Design system components
The goal: reduce time-to-action in emotionally urgent scenarios
Designing for
Time-Critical Reunions
Reporting a lost pet is emotionally charged and time sensitive. Users often abandon forms or miss potential matches due to friction.
Original Pain Points
Multi-step reporting friction
Limited visibility into potential matches
No proactive alerts
Manual rechecking behavior
Design Interventions
Streamlined reporting flow
Improved photo upload clarity
Match visibility within dashboard
Background AI-powered alerts
Outcome
Reduced friction at the most emotionally vulnerable moment and improved match review rates.
I Lost a Pet (User Journey)
I Found a Pet (User Journey)
Building a Scalable Design System
As the sole product designer, I built a design system from the ground up to support consistency, accessibility, and long-term growth.
This included:
A reusable component library (buttons, cards, toggles, menu items, etc.)
Standardized interaction patterns across reporting and search
Defined typography, spacing, and color systems
Accessibility-conscious contrast and readability standards
The system was implemented across Petco Love, Petco Love Lost, Petco Love Care, and Petco Love Adopt, creating a cohesive digital ecosystem and enabling engineering velocity as the platform scaled.
Designing for Emotional Clarity
When a pet goes missing, users are not browsing casually ā they are anxious and acting under stress. I intentionally designed the interface to be visually minimal and cognitively lightweight, reducing friction in moments of urgency.
Design Priorities:
Clear visual hierarchy
Generous whitespace
Focused decision paths
Strong visual similarity cues in match results
Progressive disclosure for secondary actions
The objective was to help users act quickly and confidently, without overwhelming them during a high-emotion experience.
Scaling the Platform
Key Post-Launch Features
Since launching the newly designed and re-architected platform in 2023, we have focused on sustained optimization and feature expansion aligned to KPIs.
Interactive Map
Launched March 2025 š
Problem
Users struggled to visualize proximity and scan reported pets efficiently.
Strategy
Shifted from list-dominant discovery to spatial-first exploration, enabling precision radius search and faster scanning.
Impact
Improved match visibility, reduced search time, and supported accelerated reunion outcomes. User growth increased by ~19% since this feature launched, indicating improved reach and engagement.
Community Search
Launched October 2025 š
Problem
Pet searches are urgent but often disorganized. Users lacked coordination tools.
Strategy
Designed a centralized hub allowing users to mobilize their network, assign guided search tasks, and use built-in sharing tools.
Impact
Expanded search surface area and increased coordinated engagement during critical search windows. Since launch, we have averaged ~40 new signups per day.
Matches for Pets
in Care
Coming soon āØ
Problem
Shelter staff are often overwhelmed with animal care responsibilities, leaving little time to manually search for potential matches between pets in their care and pets reported missing in the community. Previously, this required checking multiple platforms such as Facebook, Nextdoor, Neighbors, and other community apps ā making the process slow and fragmented.
Strategy
Leverage the platformās AI-powered photo matching system to automatically search for potential matches for pets currently in shelter care and build a workflow which surfaces high-confidence matches directly within the shelter dashboard, allowing staff to quickly review, dismiss, or contact potential pet parents. Because Petco Love Lost aggregates reports from community platforms like Nextdoor and Neighbors, shelters can check potential matches in one centralized location ā bridging otherwise disconnected reporting channels and increasing the likelihood of reunions even when pet owners never post directly on Petco Love Lost.
Impact
Launching soon, this feature is designed to significantly reduce manual search time for shelters while increasing opportunities to reconnect pets with their families.
KPI Impact
My work directly supported progress across three company KPIs.
Reunions (Goal: 100K)
86.6K estimated direct reunions FYTD
+20% above target
+52% YoY growth
Focused on improving match visibility, search relevance, and speed-to-action.
Signups (Goal: 500K)
293K+ sign-ups FYTD
+7% YoY growth
Delivered scalable SEO templates, optimized search/reporting funnels, and introduced high-intent email capture to strengthen acquisition.
NPS (Goal: 65)
Held steady at 55
Focused on strengthening trust drivers through improvements to safety, match quality, filtering clarity, and chat functionality ā investing in long-term satisfaction gains.
Love Reunited
Love Reunited
Real reunions made possible by
Petco Love Lost š
Upcoming Work
As the platform continues to scale, Iām currently leading initiatives focused on:
Enhancing the experience to support photo-matching capabilities to additional species (rabbits, reptiles, and other companion animals)
Optimizing shelter dashboards to improve case management efficiency
Expanding our community search feature
These initiatives extend our matching engine and strengthen operational workflows, supporting continued growth toward reunion and acquisition goals.
Awards and Recognitions
Webby Award Nominee
Website and Mobile Sites
Web Services & Applications 2025
Webby Award Honoree
Website and Mobile Sites
Best Use of AI 2025
Anthem Award Gold Winner
Best Use of Technology
2024
Anthem Award Gold Winner
Product
2024
Anthem Award Silver Winner
Partnership or Collaboration
2024