Shaping The
Associate Experience
Recommending Strategic Direction in Retail Merchandising.
Manager, Enterprise User Experience
The Home Depot
Management, Leadership, Product Vision and Strategy, User Experience Strategy, Experience Roadmaps, Persona, Journeys, Design
2023-Present
How I rapidly developed an experience strategy for Assortment business processes.
As a leader at the largest home improvement retailer in the nation, building and strengthening relationships with leadership partners in Product and Engineering is critical to ensuring UX is involved early in the strategic planning process. I work continuously to understand the goals, frustrations, and motivations of my partner, leveraging what I learn to influence behaviors and gain support to deliver positive impact.
For this particular retail giant, design quality is often measured by the speed of delivery, not measured improvements to the experience. This factor often motivates partners to rapidly deliver on requests sent by their highly influential Merchandising leaders. Merchants drive rapid changes and exert a significant influence over the direction of internal digital products. Product Management, under pressure to move fast, can become frustrated by the pace of UX research and design efforts to emphasize more user-centered solutions.
However, Product Management is also aware of the need for a better long-term vision and strategy fueled by better user insights intended to drive frictionless user experiences in business processes. This case study focuses on how I led a last-minute, important, strategic request with Product Management and Engineering partners, establishing a path for delivering immediate needs, while setting future strategic direction for a Merchandising Assortment product called myAssortment.
Leaders in Merchandising described their work as “the wild, wild west.” When changes are needed, changes are made.
Merchants drive changes as the Chief Strategist of their categories. When under pressure to meet sales goals, Merchants and their teams seek technology solutions to meet their immediate needs.
myAssortment is a digital product heavily impacted by these changes.
My team of UX Researchers and Designers supports this Product. which was designed to provide visibility into Assortment strategies, while offering features like:
Product Management works with cross-functional team members to support Merchant needs by rapidly integrating features to address immediate needs. Product wants to keep the Merchant happy and support business goals. However, a focus on the immediate needs resulted in a short-sighted view leading to usage behaviors that have introduced errors in product placement, decreased intuitiveness, and user frustration.
Focusing on speed of delivery introduced issues in the following areas …
Product Management had inadvertently introduced 9 ways to group products.
Too many steps were required for setting up a new product, adding inefficiency.
Working around complexity resulted in an excessive (841) alternative groups.
The lowest number of accurate product placements since 2018 (69%).
Product asked for my help in rapidly setting a long-term strategy for Assortment
Under a lot of pressure, my Product Director partner scheduled a last-minute meeting with the subject “Designing the Future State of Assortments.” This meeting created a lot of concerns across my UX team and Engineering partners.
I was asked to help get something done in the short time available for this workshop. This would be a test in stakeholder management, managing complexity, strategic thinking, and adaptability.
Lead the collaboration between Prod, Eng. and UX design leaders.
Define the strategic direction for the myAssortment product.
Pitch for funding to be with the VP of Merchandising.
I started by understanding the concerns of stakeholders prior to workshopping …
“We need more time. How are we doing this in a 1hr meeting?”
– Sr. UX Design
“ We don’t have data. How do we know what wrong?”
– Product Manager
“I’ve never seen future state. What is a future state anyway?”
– Staff Engineer
I adapted for speed in collaboration …
I established a plan to focus more on discussing, documenting, and aligning on business goals in Assortment.
My team and I adapted to map the current, shared understanding of what led to the issues, and why.
I drafted a plan to deliver ideas for the future state, and a research plan to learn about users and validate ideas.
I used a strategy blueprint to align the teams on the challenges…
In the 2-3 hours, I managed to capture insights to help better understand the challenges, aspirations, focus areas, principles, success measures, and action items
I developed a detailed plan of action to shape future…
I was able to introduce work human-centered methods with partners …
I leveraged IBM Design Thinking methods, after our workshop, taking what was discussed and using the information to build:
I encouraged the creation of a North Star…
I successfully drove my partners toward building an aspirational state that would be shared with the VP of Merchandising, helping to provide a long-term plan to earn funding support.
I aligned strategic themes to aspirational designs
I led the design of concepts that helped communicate the future experience we wanted to create. This supported Product vision for the future.
I mapped a future experience …
I mapped strategic themes with the a narrative of how future users would interact with the product. I also led research efforts to assess concepts and confirm user impact, and potential business value.
I set an experience roadmap with timelines for delivery
Improving triangulation accuracy to 85% by improving visibility into Assortment strategy between SKU, Set, Store relationships.
Reducing duplicate sets by 20% (from 80% to 60%), resulting in less time implementing changes to Assortments.
The final results led to funding for 2-3 years …
I was able to partner with cross-functional leaders and quickly create a plan of action to set future-state. I was also able to introduce ways of working that would highlight how UX can support strategic development for Product. My team would go on to build on the strategic themes and initiatives to be broken down, designed, developed, and delivered by Engineering (keeping a healthy backlog). Some initial data showed positive trends:
Improving triangulation
accuracy to 85%
My team implemented snippets of data to help alert Merchants to errors in Assortment that might lead to misplaced products (triangulation errors). By improving visibility into Assortment strategy between SKU, Set, Store relationships, we helped improve product placements, which leads to better customer experiences, and improved sales.
Reducing duplicate
sets by 20% (from 80% to 60%)
“Set” is a grouping mechanism for Products. Merchants introduced a workaround to editing Set, opting to duplicate, edit, submit, and monitor. This made it difficult for teams to understand what changes were made and why. Our solution introduces a prompt that would inform Merchant teams when a similar Set is already present, and pivot users to editing that similar Set, while tracking changes behind the scenes.