“This is epic”, SVP Product Management

“This is the most productive I’ve been in months” Principle Product Manager

Unified View of Inventory is a term that speaks to the capability of an order management system (OMS) to provide inventory managers with a consolidated, real-time view of inventory data such as stock levels, locations, availability and channels. This capability enables inventory managers to optimise what they have available to sell (ATS) to reduce overselling and underselling.

This feature is one of many examples where we practised Design Thinking in the creation of the experience. Educating, working with new and modern practices and changing the perception of Design with our colleagues along the way.

The steps we took to realise this vision include (see associated screenshots below):

Fig. 01 - The Framework
Starting with our Product Development Framework for guidance. This framework was something I conceived as an evolution of the existing PDF

Fig. 02 - The Double Diamond
Copying the double diamond framework into the working Miro board gave me, my team and all our collaborators guidance and assurance of our approach

Fig. 03 - Context = Expectation + Understanding
We started out understanding the expectations of the business followed by bringing all our knowledge in this area together

Fig. 04 - Feeding a repository of insights for the future
This knowledge would be mined from multiple channels including email, slack, online research, SME conversations and existing work done by the Solution Engineering team in this space

Fig. 05 - Identifying our target persona(s)
We then brought in our personas to identify who we were designing these features for.

Fig. 06 - Customer Validation Strategy
By doing this we were also able to identify the most relevant and valuable customers we could engage with to validate we were on the right track as well as set up for adoption.

Fig. 07 - Milestone planning
We then Identified all the use cases for this capability and prioritised these by milestones with SMEs.

Fig. 08 - Jobs to be done and task analysis
We broke down these use cases by down by tasks and designed a framework to understand the sequence and journey for performing these tasks.

Fig. 09 - Delivering Milestone 1
With a vision in sight, we broke away to begin work on milestone 1 (M1). All the understanding we had done to date served us and our collaborator well in creating concepts.

Fig. 10 - Customer Validation
We took these early concepts to our customers for feedback

Fig. 11 - Production Design ready for Development (Figma)
Following minor tweaks from internal stakeholders and customers we provided a final production-ready design to engineering for a M1 release while we continued on the vision and subsequent milestones.

All these steps were performed while continuously collaborating with many teams and SMEs across the business. We communicated our plans and progress to invite feedback every step of the way. The work produced here led by myself and the design team contributed significantly towards elevating Design in a largely sales and engineering-driven organisation. The process, progress, rigour and collaboration we drove prompted our SVP of Product to say “This is epic”.

Business Objective

• Even though this capability is available to build on Fluent’s composable platform it requires additional work and cost to provide this table stakes capability. Our partners and sales teams were requesting this feature OOTB and not as a customisation at an additional cost to the client. Designing front-end experiences OOTB also enables Fluent to demonstrate the value proposition of the platform and the ability to design delightful experiences through its front-end frameworks.

Customer Problem

• Enable Inventory managers to understand their inventory position with minimal effort. Providing a unified view of inventory is a table stakes feature that we would provide OOTB (Out of the box) to enable Inventory managers to reduce under and over-selling.

Design Challenge

• Deliver a best-in-class validated UI that solves the customer problem for the majority of our global customers. Validate this approach to ensure it is valuable and enables our Inventory Managers to perform their role more effectively and easily.

Achievements

• This was a landmark feature in our objective as a design team to bring Design Thinking to Fluent Commerce.

• Improved the perception of design and the product design team's brand

• Showed initiative and capability by stepping in and leading this effort in the absence of a product manager. The absence of a PM allowed our work to shine

• Moved the needle and objective of our team by practising Design Thinking projects through a hands-on approach

• Recognition from our closest collaborators and wider business for this innovative, progressive method of problem-solving.