Flight Deck
A simple, unified solution to Jet / Walmart’s retail strategy.
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Project context | Solution | Process | Reflection
The problem with category management
Jet.com (Jet) was an online shopping site featuring products from various categories. Each category has a category manager who is an expert on all the products in a particular line of business.
For example, suppose you are a category manager for toys. In that case, you are responsible for managing, merchandising, and pricing toys on Jet and maintaining relationships with toy brands across the globe.
When I joined Jet, there were approximately 100 people on the category management team. After Jet's acquisition by Walmart in 2016, the category management team grew to 400 people. They used a patchwork of processes, including running SQL queries, downloading data into Excel, and sending emails over the wall.
Category managers needed a holistic view of their business across web analytics, revenue goals, and supply chain issues. My team's mission was to solve these problems through a simple, unified approach to category management.
The output of user-centered research; unpacking issues and opportunities to solve with Flight Deck
My role
I was the Design Lead. I started as a design team of one, rolling up my sleeves through research to design. As the project grew, I hired and managed three additional product designers.
My team partnered with product managers, developers, and business stakeholders. This included the Chief Revenue Officer of Jet.com and Walmart, who had regular involvement with the product development process.
Solving category managers’ needs
Research and heuristic evaluation led us to understand that category managers monitor a combination of site metrics and revenue/product metrics.
They needed to manage sales and traffic for their respective categories and manage product supply. On the product side, they needed a way to be exposed to core insights and address critical issues. With this understanding, my team and I defined vital goals and a vision for category managers:
Category managers need a way to get closer to the customers' mindset when merchandising products.
In-context data and insights are fundamental to successful category management, especially when consolidated into a unified platform.
Easy-to-digest summaries are more helpful than metrics without context.
These insights culminated in the core opportunities for Flight Deck, a proprietary category management product built to serve the growing needs of category managers.
Metrics and insights
We quickly learned that hunting for answers would take a lot of work, with each category manager often overseeing thousands of products within each category. Flight Deck serves up aggregated metrics for each category and strategic insights to help ensure that category managers focus on the right opportunities.
Helping guide new users, and supporting experts
With a user base growing from 100 to over 400, we needed to ensure that beginners and experts could use Flight Deck. Helpful explanations in natural language guide novices, while keyboard commands and sortable lists help experts quickly take action.
Process
A group of users in a collaborative sketching session
The output of a card-sorting exercise with users, to understand their most valued processes
Sitting down with users to perform contextual research to understand how they work
Some of the research activities my team and I collaborated on included:
Retail stakeholder workshops
Contextual research
Collaborative sketching and design thinking with users
Qualitative and quantitative surveys with varied user types
A heuristic audit of existing retail tools
A competitive analysis of products on the market
A selection of our style guide, drawing on a harmonization between Jet.com and Walmart
Only some ideas made it to production. Here is an example of a design treatment that never saw the light of day. These experiments are instrumental in shaping what goes into production.
Additionally, we created the following design deliverables:
Research findings report/presentation
Storyboards of how users might engage with Flight Deck
Wireframes and functional specifications
A click-through prototype
Hi-fidelity screen designs
A style guide
My team partnered with product managers, developers, and stakeholders from the retail team across Jet and Walmart to bring Flight Deck to life.
Reflection
Flight Deck is just one of many initiatives my team and I spearheaded at Jet. Flight Deck is embedded into category managers' workflows across Jet and Walmart and all the other Walmart eCommerce Brands, like Hayneedle and Shoes.com. Focusing on human-centered problems and Jet's business strategy led to a cross-brand platform to drive change.
Walmart acquired Jet for $3.3 billion in 2016. The acquisition also included the usage of Flight Deck to be used by Walmart category managers globally, helping unify and streamline the buying process across Walmart's eCommerce brands.