Root Cause in Retail Analytics
Giving merchants strategic performance information in one place so they can understand exceptions in context and take appropriate actions.
Problem overview
The Role of a Merchant
Merchants form the backbone of retail strategy and execution. Each merchant controls a product category with deep understandings of supply chain management, negotiation, and problem mitigation. They act as their own CEO when dealing with operational teams and outside vendors, and are solely responsible when things go right or wrong.
Analyzing Multi-million Dollar Revenue Streams
The disorganized landscape of analytical tools leave merchants missing critical insights into their business. They lack ways to find root cause patterns and frequently find dead ends in data. This wasted time leads to increased costs, missed opportunities for growth, and frustrated users limited by the tools at their disposal.
Focusing on Opportunities
Merchants long for a complete set of digital reference tools to help them put data in context of key business events. From there, they need ways to share and collaborate amongst their peers to prioritize their focus on products, pricing, and promotions that meet customer needs.
How Might We Increase Understanding of Root Cause issues?
I worked with a team of 450 merchants to overcome stagnation in legacy reporting systems and increase collaborative root cause analysis tacking during their daily, weekly, and monthly business reviews. Each business subunit had unique challenges, but after in depth ethnographic studies, multiple design sprints, and turning our users into designers we emerged with a North star vision and a tactical plan to get there.
role
Design Lead
team
450 Merchants
8 Product Managers
5 Engineering teams
12 Business Analysists
6 Designers
Countless others willing to teach us along the way.
As Design Lead, I managed a team of 6 designers through a multi-faceted North star vision consisting of ethnographic studies, design sprints, explorative prototyping, concept validation, usability, product development and analytics.
Understanding Merchants
When setting out to understand merchants, we divided and conquered. I led research efforts with designers on the team to capture ethnographic data on merchant activities and needs.
Merchandising is ritualistic – consisting of many daily tasks revolving around the pulse of the business (i.e weekend shopping).
Dialects of analysis differ among business units – however many activities had grown from a common source.
Articulating root cause to leadership and peers was the priority task quickly followed by formulating strategies in response.
Refining Complex Business Needs
Multiple reference books of information would be needed to fully explain what we learned about merchandising. Summarizing user needs became a project by its own right.
We created flow diagrams to capture the root cause analysis and decision making process.
Journey maps summarized a consistent way of working across multiple business units.
Affinity clusters grouped users needs and jobs to be done into digestible themes ready for problem solving.
Focusing Approach with Design Sprints
Equipped with these insights, I led multiple design sprints focused on defining actionable problems.
How might we… empower merchants to plan and execute their 30, 60 and 90 day plans with leadership review?
HMW time box insights so merchants can focus on current, actionable trends?
HMW give merchants context into their relative performance and impact on peers?
HMW contextualize performance from the past, present, and future forecasts?
Focusing around specific problem statements provided opportunities for additional field research. We recruited users spread across many demographics for co-design sessions.
Participants generated recognizable patterns in their flows.
Overviews of performance compared to previous years.
Data summaries using natural language.
Weather comparisons.
Sales, profit and inventory visualizations directing attention to problem areas.
Ability to share findings with team and generate reports for leadership.
We captured these into testable prototypes for further refinement.
Merchants validated and challenged our ideas.
A North star solution emerged.
With validation complete, merchants indicated they longed for an experience that allowed them to tell structured stories about the data they were already analyzing. These were expert users left without a voice to communicate.
Users are alerted to potential root cause issues forming in their profit and loss data.
A guided approach to data analysis suggests recommended visualizations based on historic analysis.
Messages allow users to share key findings with peers and leadership.
Completed reports are published to the platform.
Merchants can view products in context to raw data and analyze causal patterns.
By drilling down into potential problems, merchants create a wholistic view of their business and can respond accordingly.
Impact
110+ Users engaged. 315+ Reports analyzed. 1 Vision produced.
It’s been two years since our initial vision and product, design and tech partners continue referencing back to our findings. We summarized the inner workings of a roughly 450 individual strong organization. Captured feedback from roughly 110 users. We also started the process of eliminating 315 similar reports.
Insights from our research have fueled the creation of a multi-product platform consisting of 5 distinct main tools serving the merchant organization.