01 Background

Offer Management System before my time

The blow slideshows demonstrate the previous version for Offer Management before I joint the team. It was just a hack to Amazon legacy platform. A lot of the links and navigation are broken. It’s really hard to use and certainly won’t scale when the business grow internally.

02 Design goals and requirements

The design goal

Target users

The first step to design Offer Management is to understand who the users are and their roles and responsibilities. The target users for offer management are Business Development Managers, Instock Managers, Creative team members, Marketing team members, Division Managers for the Trucks, Offer Champions, leaders and 3rd party vendors. I conducted multiple interviews with internal stakeholders from multiple teams and vendors.

The requirements

After I get good understanding of the users, the next step is to figure out the business requirements for Offer Management. Our principal product manager had a long Excel spreadsheet which listed all features she wanted. However, I found some items are clearly outdated and others don’t make much senses. I start meeting with PM and other stakeholders and understood what their needs for Offer Management. The below are PM’s original spreadsheet, one of the meeting notes and the final requirements for Offer Management.

03 Feature design

Offer planning and creation is the essential piece of Treasure Truck offer management. Treasure Truck runs 3 to 5 offers each week in 28 cities in US. For each offer, the offer planning and creation process starts from T-90 days. The business development manager will submit the offer proposal in T-90. The finance manager will approve the offer in T-60. Then, the in-stock team will forecast the sales in each city and place PO in T-30. The area manager in field team for each city will plan their stops and truck route for the offer day in T-15. The area management also need to get confirmation from location vendor by T-7. The creative will start work on Offer images, videos and copy in T-10. The offer champion will lock the offer in T-2 and publish the offer in offer day. Previously, the team members rely a lot on Excel, Email, Outlook calendar or even in person talk to track offer status. The design goal for Offer Management is to provide a central web portal for each stakeholders to have a central places to finish all their works online and easily track offer status.

Offer homepage

The design below is the home page for one offer. The timeline on the top of the page provides the overall view of the offer status. Hovering on each node will show tooltip with more details. The graph and icons also provide an overview of how much the offer prepare work has been done. The thumbnail of each stakeholders provide a shortcut for offer champion to follow up with these people.

Offer preview

The end user experience is high impacted by creative work, such as photos, video and copy of each offer. The Treasure Truck is mobile first. 90% of the sales are coming from Amazon App. It’s important for the creative team to know the end user experience while working on the offer. One of the pain point in Offer Management 1.0 is the creative team doesn’t know how exactly the end experience is. One more word in the copy can cause unexpected spacing. In Offer Management, I designed preview feature as below.

This feature design got great positive feedback from creative team and the leadership. However, based on Dev team’s schedule, this feature won’t be able to be implemented in one year. To address this pain point and help creative and more important the millions end customers get better experience, I use my spare time to develop a Chrome extension, which can achieve the core preview function. The below is the screenshot of the how the Chrome extension works.

This extension has been installed by the whole team and got enormous positive feedback from the leadership and team members. Eventually, it was adopted by engineer team for future maintenance.

Offer day dashboard

On an offer day, there is a lot of things going on. Each city sends out Start Of The Day notification to our customers via SMS or Push at different time. We have 28 trucks going out in 4 different time zones. Each truck has 3 crew members. The communication rely on phone call and text message. The Truck can run into many problems even before they leave the Fulfillment Center. During the day, we are tracking the sales on each Truck via sending emails to the whole group every 5 minutes. The list goes on and on. It’s really hard to track how the Offer doing. The team setup a War room, which the directors and leaders sitting in from 5:30am to the end of the day to track things and deal with all issues. Offer Day Dashboard is in a urgent need to address these issues and reduce the operation effort. The below slides show the final design.

04 Design Spec

After we finalize the design solution, the next step is to create the UX spec for engineer team. The UX spec for this project was created by Sketch Measure. The spec is an interactive website, which the developers can click any item in the UI to get the details such as size, pending, color, etc. The below are the screenshot.

05 Results

When I joint the team, Treasure Truck only piloted in Seattle with one truck. After one year, Treasure Truck rolled out to 28 cities in US and 6 cities in UK. The business also grew from one offer a week to five offer a week. The updated Offer Management platform successfully supported the Treasure Truck international business expansion. The user feedback from hundreds of customers was very positive.