Designing the system behind incentives.
A visual workspace for designing incentive flows across the Bolt ecosystem. Independent concept. Not an official Bolt product.
ROLE
PRODUCT DESIGN LEAD
PROJECT TYPE
INDEPENDENT PRODUCT CONCEPT
SCOPE
PRODUCT STRATEGY · UX/UI · SYSTEM DESIGN · WORKING PROTOTYPE
Incentive flows. One system.
An incentive experience connects a trigger, conditions, eligibility, a reward, and the interface people interact with.
When those decisions live in separate documents and screens, it becomes difficult to see how the experience fits together across products.
Bolt Incentives Studio brings the design into one visual flow, with Product Spaces and initiatives providing the context around it.
One incentive system. Every Bolt experience.
A shared design language, starting with a focused foundation.
MY ROLE
From product vision to a working foundation.
I approached Incentives Studio as an independent 0→1 product concept: defining the product model, shaping the workspace experience, and building its foundation.
The work connects product strategy, information architecture, a visual flow canvas, workspace membership, and draft persistence in one coherent design environment.
Module 01 establishes authentication, workspaces, projects, and a canvas with draft save and restore. Rules, simulation, validation, and handoff remain later-module ambitions.
// Define the system.
// Design the experience.
// Build the foundation.
Product Strategy
0→1 definition · MVP scope · product model
UX & Systems
Product Spaces · initiatives · incentive flows
Design
UI/UX · design system · canvas interaction
Build
Authentication · workspace access · draft persistence
THE PRODUCT APPROACH
Design the whole incentive experience.
Product designers need to understand an incentive as a connected experience: what starts it, who qualifies, what is offered, and how it appears.
The product model separates rules, incentives, and UI components so they can become reusable parts of a flow. Product Spaces organize the work; initiatives connect related incentive flows.
The first module makes that structure tangible: enter a workspace, open an initiative, create a flow, and return to the saved canvas draft.
// Start with the flow.
// Keep the product context connected.
ORGANIZE
Rides
Food
Product Spaces
DEFINE
Initiative
Objective
DESIGN
Flow
Canvas
PERSIST
Saved draft
↓
Studio
THE FOUNDATION
A workspace for every incentive flow.
WORKSPACE
Personal
Shared
Membership
INITIATIVE
Product
Objective
FLOW
Nodes
Connections
DRAFT
Save / restore
↓
Module 01
THE CHALLENGE
One ecosystem. Different products. Complex incentive logic.
Incentive experiences involve more than offering customers a reward.
Behind every offer is a combination of triggers, eligibility rules, business conditions, customer interactions, and possible outcomes.
As the number of services and scenarios increases, these relationships become harder to design, communicate, and validate consistently.
The design opportunity
How might we enable teams to create different incentive experiences using a shared system of logic, behavior, and reusable components?
PRODUCT STRATEGY
Design the behavior before designing the interface.
Rather than starting with a traditional campaign dashboard, I approached incentives as a network of connected decisions.
The strategy centered on three principles:
Flow-first thinking
Make relationships, dependencies, and decision paths visible before defining their customer-facing presentation.
Reusable foundations
Establish shared primitives for incentives while allowing each product to maintain its own business rules.
Testable experiences
Enable teams to explore eligibility, customer states, and alternative outcomes before implementation.
The goal wasn’t to standardize every promotion. It was to create a common language for designing how incentives work.
THE SYSTEM MODEL
Breaking incentive complexity into reusable building blocks.
I structured incentive journeys around seven fundamental node types.
Trigger
↓
Condition
↓
Incentive
↓
Component
↓
Action
↓
Wait
↓
Outcome
Each node represents a distinct responsibility.
Triggers establish when an incentive journey begins. Conditions evaluate eligibility. Incentives define the benefit. Components determine how it appears to customers. Actions capture interactions. Wait nodes introduce time-dependent behavior. Outcomes establish the resulting state.
Instead of designing each campaign independently, teams can compose different experiences using shared logic.
One model. Multiple incentive journeys.
THE STUDIO
From abstract rules to a connected visual experience.
The Studio translates the system model into an interactive design environment.
WHO IT’S FOR
Built for the teams behind incentive experiences.
Product designers
Create incentive flows and shape customer interactions.
Design-system designers
Maintain reusable components, variants, and interaction patterns.
Product managers & UX leads
Review objectives, constraints, eligibility, and edge cases.
Engineers
Inspect flow logic, behavior, and specifications for implementation.
Product Board
An organized workspace for managing independent incentive flows across Rides, Food, and cross-product experiences.
Visual Flow Canvas
A node-based editor for constructing incentive logic, connecting conditions, and exploring different behavioral paths.
Configuration & Components
A structured approach to defining how incentives behave and how customers experience them.
Simulation
An environment for executing flow logic and examining different eligibility and outcome scenarios.
Together, these capabilities bring product strategy, interaction design, and business logic into one connected workspace.
CROSS-PRODUCT SCENARIOS
Shared foundations. Product-specific behavior.
A customer completing a ride and a customer placing a food order can interact with different incentives, even when those experiences share underlying concepts such as eligibility, validity, and redemption.
The Studio explores these relationships without forcing every service into the same journey.
Independent product flows can be connected through controlled handoffs, allowing cross-product scenarios while preserving their individual rules and boundaries.
This also creates a foundation for exploring membership-driven incentives involving Bolt Plus.
The key principle: Reuse the underlying logic, not necessarily the entire customer experience.
DESIGN DECISIONS & ENGINEERING
Designing beyond the canvas.
Building the Studio required decisions about how visual flows should behave as a real application.
Independent flows instead of one large graph
Organizing logic into smaller product-level flows supports modularity and makes cross-product dependencies more explicit.
Controlled cross-product connections
Bounded handoffs preserve flow boundaries and introduce safeguards against invalid connections and circular dependencies.
Server-backed simulation
Authenticated execution connects visual configuration with persisted application data rather than relying entirely on static demonstration scenarios.
Product-aware modeling
Service-specific configurations can coexist with shared primitives without unnecessarily fragmenting the system.
The application uses Next.js, React Flow, Supabase, and Vercel, bringing product modeling, visual interaction, and persistent data into one technical foundation.
OUTCOME
From product hypothesis to a working system.
The exploration progressed from an ecosystem-level opportunity into a structured incentive model, a visual editing experience, and a functioning technical foundation.
The implementation includes persistent flow graphs, cross-flow execution, eligibility evaluation, and shared product context.
At the documented engineering checkpoint, 264 automated tests passed, alongside type checking, linting, and production build validation. Browser-level acceptance remained a separate validation step.
As an independent exploration, this work does not represent an internal Bolt product or claim production adoption or measured commercial outcomes.
The takeaway
Design systems can go beyond visual consistency.
They can establish a shared language for designing the logic, behavior, and interactions that power increasingly complex product experiences.