Consultant
A retail client called me in because, in their words, the website is broken. Conversion was down twelve percent quarter over quarter and nobody could agree on why. I started by writing down every plausible cause — pricing, search, checkout, mobile performance, paid traffic mix, returns policy. There were eleven. Instead of investigating all of them, I asked their team which two changes had shipped in the previous ninety days. There were three. One was a checkout redesign. I pulled the funnel data on that step alone and found a forty-percent drop on mobile add-to-cart confirmation. That was the lever. We rolled back the confirmation modal, conversion recovered eight points in two weeks, and the remaining four were unrelated and structural. The thing that worked was refusing to investigate everything at once and starting from what had actually changed recently. The vague brief was not the real problem; the real problem was a button.