ZEOS Support Vision & Help Center

Background

With the introduction of ZEOS, Zalando’s Ecommerce Operating System, as an aggressive push into the B2B space, the immediate priority was enabling the multi-channel fulfillment services infrastructure and corresponding portal, ZEOS One. But logistics tools are only as reliable as the support systems behind them. While Zalando has spent a decade perfecting support for wholesale partners and consumers of the online fashion store, ZEOS required a completely different playbook to assist merchants operating businesses in Europe. Furthermore, as usage of the portal increases and more partners are onboarded, it's critical support teams won't become bottlenecks for partner's success.

To establish a baseline understanding of the support realm in the fulfilment landscape, I conducted a thoroguh competitive analysis to analyse the support capability offerings of industry leaders. A simplified summary of the capability analysis is displayed in the table below.

Establishing the Foundation

With the competitor analysis complete and the three horizons roadmap defined, the immediate next step became clear: we needed a centralized Help Center. A robust knowledge base tailored for our multi-channel merchants which is more than just a content repository; it is the fundamental unlocking piece for our entire support strategy. Establishing this foundation would not only support (and house) future capabilities, but directly address our vision of merchant autonomy — empowering users to independently unblock themselves and therefore reducing reliance on manual support from our Customer Care and Partner Care teams for common queries.

Content Categorization

Structuring the Help Center was less about organising the first set of articles, and more about defining a structure that could scale with both the product and its users over time. To establish a shared information hierarchy, I facilitated a series of card-sorting workshops with stakeholders from product, support, marketing, and design. The goal was not consensus for its own sake, but to surface differing mental models and negotiate a structure that could work across functions.

These sessions also exposed a larger organisational gap: content ownership. As a result, the work extended beyond the Help Center itself and triggered a re-evaluation of our product development process — introducing user documentation as a non-negotiable part of feature launches, something that had previously been overlooked.

Trade-offs & Launch decisions

While I generally prefer to bring in end-users as early on as possible in the design process, when changes are cheap, we felt confident to rely on the the extensive insights and data collected from the newly updated Partner University experience, and instead save the external involvement for the usability testing.

To enable a faster initial launch, we intentionally postponed the content management system (CMS) integration and hard-coded the first set of articles. This allowed us to validate the structure and usage patterns before investing in a more complex technical setup with Contentful.

Instead of hiding empty categories, we chose to keep placeholders visible on the landing page. This helped establish a clear mental model for users and signalled the intended scope of the Help Center, while setting expectations for future content expansion.

Outcome & Impact

Reduced dependency on our support teams for common hurdles. Faster onboarding for brand new merchants. A foundation for scaling documentation alongside the product.

TL;DR

In close partnership with Product, I defined the long-term vision and three-horizon roadmap for the ZEOS Support Ecosystem, transitioning the platform from high-touch manual support to a scalable self-service model.

• Strategic Roadmap: Co-authored the vision for support capabilities, aligning technical feasibility with a long-term merchant-first user experience and gap analysis of the market.
• 0-to-1 Product Leadership: Led the end-to-end design of the ZEOS Help Center, covering everything from user journeys and information architecture to usability testing and engineering handover.
• Systemic Thinking: Architected new support components, as an extension to our design system, now leveraged by the ZEOS Developer Portal, driving cross-user interface and experience consistency.
• Future-Proofing: Established the foundation for upcoming AI-driven support and contextual in-portal help capabilities, directly reducing dependency on manual partner care agents which not only saves the merchant time but also reduces costs for Zalando.