Separating identity from transactions so one person could hold multiple giving accounts.

The legacy model made a person and their giving activity the same thing.

That assumption worked for a simpler account experience, but it became a constraint as the platform prepared for family and youth giving. A person needed a stable identity while participating in more than one transactional context, and those contexts needed clear ownership and access rules.

This account work formed part of a year-long sequence of four foundational infrastructure releases behind Charitable Allowance.

Change the model without losing clarity across product surfaces and data flows.

• Define the identity account as the durable representation of the person.
• Define transactional accounts around giving and money movement.
• Allow multiple transactional accounts beneath one identity account.
• Identify the customer, backend, and data dependencies touched by the new relationships.
• Give engineering and QA acceptance criteria that described behavior, not only a proposed interface.

Start with entities and relationships, then walk the journeys that rely on them.

1. Clarify the vocabulary. The split between identity and transactional accounts needed language that product, engineering, design, QA, and internal teams could use consistently.
2. Model cardinality and lifecycle. Requirements described how one identity could connect to multiple transactional accounts and where state or ownership decisions surfaced.
3. Trace downstream behavior. I worked with engineering to identify how the model affected customer journeys, backend management, and data flows.
4. Sequence the backlog. Stories and acceptance criteria translated the model into testable increments within the broader foundational-release arc.

Public evidence boundary.

The source materials behind this work include entity maps, user journeys, dependency views, and acceptance criteria. The public version explains the product model and the evidence boundary without exposing confidential implementation detail.

The model shipped as infrastructure and unlocked later feature development.

The account restructure and multi-account enablement formed part of the four-release foundation behind the 2025 Charitable Allowance launch. The defensible result is that the platform could represent an identity separately from multiple transactional accounts and use that structure for downstream work.

A data-model decision is also a product-language decision.

Teams move faster when they share precise words for the entities a system represents. This story focuses on the trade-offs behind the chosen model and the moments where a concrete diagram changed the conversation.