One platform for hundreds of millions of messages.

When I picked up Square’s messaging platform, the ecosystem around it was the wild west. Dozens of product teams were each building their own campaigns, nobody could say who owned half of them, and there was no simple way to see how a message performed or shut it down if it went sideways. The platform itself existed and worked, but it was thin. Two channels, a handful of formats, and not enough range for teams to give up the tools they’d already built. My job was to change that math and make switching cheaper than staying.

I spent two years leading the platform’s design: auditing every custom message I could find, sitting with the teams sending them, and turning one-off requests into reusable formats. We added push and SMS, an image library, a richer template system, and AI-assisted content and localization. The interesting part was rarely the feature itself. It was deciding which requests deserved to become a real capability, which ones I had to turn down, and then finding another way to help that team anyway. By the end it wasn’t a tool teams tolerated. It was where 50+ of them went first.