TL;DR:
Incorporación is the process by which a Director brings a new Consultant into her personal group — the exact moment a business is born inside Yanbal and, therefore, the growth engine of the entire company. The process had been designed around operations, not around the people who live it. I ran a mixed-method study: desk research with corporate and country stakeholders, plus field research in Colombia and Peru interviewing 20+ Directors across all career levels and 30 Consultants — both enrollers and non-enrollers. Those findings dismantled inherited assumptions, produced new paradigms about why someone enrolls (or doesn't), and drove a full product redesign. A pilot in Colombia validated the key hypotheses, and development is now underway to roll out the new experience in Bolivia.
The business challenge
In a direct sales model, growth doesn’t come from selling more: it comes from more people joining and staying. Incorporación — the process by which a Director brings a new Consultant into her personal group — is that front door. It’s the moment a business is born inside Yanbal.
The problem: the process had been designed around the company’s operational logic (requirements, credit validation, documentation) rather than around the experience of the two people who actually live it — the Director who invites and the Consultant who decides to join.
The starting question: Why does a Director with every motivation to grow end up enrolling far fewer people than she could, and why does a genuinely interested candidate drop off halfway through?
My role
I led the research and the design of the new experience as Product Designer, connecting the findings with corporate teams, country stakeholders, and the development team currently building it.
The process
I designed the research in two layers, to avoid settling for either the official version of the process or isolated anecdotes:
1. Desk research and internal interviews. Mapping the process as the company believes it works, with corporate stakeholders and country leads. This is where the gaps between the documented process and each market’s real process surfaced.
2. Field research in Colombia and Peru. Two markets with different maturity and behavior, chosen to separate the structural from the local:
- 20+ Directors across all career levels.
- 30 Consultants, deliberately split between enrollers and non-enrollers.
That last decision was the most important one in the study: interviewing only those who enroll tells you how they do it, but never why the others don’t. The contrast between the two groups was where the real signal appeared.
[To complete: 3-5 key insights, each with a verbatim user quote. This is the highest-value block of the case — the “Nueva MAYA” pattern with its 7 insights works well and is worth replicating here.]
From inherited assumptions to new paradigms
As a market leader, Yanbal held deeply rooted beliefs about why someone decides to join. Part of the work was putting those beliefs to the test instead of assuming them: some held up, others collapsed, and from that came the new paradigms the redesign was built on.
[To complete: 2-3 pairs of “inherited assumption → what we found”. This contrast is the argumentative core of the case and what demonstrates research judgment, not just execution.]
Validation: the Colombia pilot
Rather than launching the full redesign, we ran a pilot in Colombia to confront the hypotheses with real behavior before committing to regional development.
[To complete: what was tested, with how many people, over what period, what was confirmed and — above all — what wasn’t. Reporting a failed hypothesis adds senior credibility; hiding it removes it.]
Results
- New enrollment paradigms validated in the field and adopted as the foundation of the redesign.
- Product redesigned end to end based on evidence rather than intuition.
- Development underway: the new experience launches in Bolivia as the first market, with projected rollout across the region.
[To complete once available: enrollment rate, process completion time, or retention metrics for new Consultants. Until then, keep the honesty of what has actually been proven.]
What I learned
Designing a process that spans two people at once — the one who invites and the one who joins — forces you to stop thinking in screens and start thinking about the whole service. The biggest takeaway was methodological: the sample you choose determines what you’re able to discover. Deliberately including the Consultants who don’t enroll completely changed the diagnosis, and with it, the product.