CASE STUDY
From a Wine Fridge to the Cold Hard Facts
The origin of Enterprise Product Design at Wayfair.
I wanted a wine fridge for our bedroom. Head tilt and eyebrow raise aside, let me continue.
At the time, my teenage son lived with us, which limited our ability to simply relax without interruption and the constant assault of one-sided epic gaming battles that broadcasted throughout our apartment.
Searching wine fridges on Wayfair.com...
There was a great selection, but I found many of the fridges were missing dimensions and the necessary door swing details. Upon further investigation, I noticed that products in other categories also displayed inconsistent details. At the time, I was managing product design for a different area of the company, but I became obsessed with the opportunity to enhance our e-commerce experience with accurate and abundant details (regardless of the fridge).
Challenge
The initial challenge was tracking down who was responsible for maintaining our product pages. Since I had a few friends in the customer service and sales domains, I started there. Although they did not have the information or solutions I sought, they voiced the same frustration when on sales and service calls with customers. They sent me to category management.
Category management was aware of the missing details, but was focused on managing product curation. They indicated that contracts with our suppliers, including the management of products, was handled by account management. Off I went.
The account managers were also well versed in the need for better product details. They showed me thousands of emails with our suppliers in an effort to get them to provide this information. Metrics demonstrated the impact on sales and customer service agents reported an unusually high volume of issues with inaccurate product details.
There appeared to be no individual or group that owned the supplier experience or related systems.
I didn’t give up and instead contacted 6 of our top suppliers to gain a better understanding of the problem. The consensus was that the supplier portal was difficult to use, and since there were multiple applications where product details could be managed, suppliers were confused. As a result they didn’t update their products for fear they would break something.
Solution
As my exploration reveals, there were multiple parties involved in creating a solution to the experience our suppliers struggled with. Without a single leader, I became the conduit for unifying a number of disparate teams around an initiative to first improve how product metadata is managed. With over 80 tools and systems that comprise the supplier’s online experience, this was a solid step toward proving the need for design thinking and the creation of a cohesive platform.
The biggest challenge was resisting the urge to tackle a broader range of opportunities. Much of the online supplier experience could benefit from a consistent approach and unification of folks across the organization.
Research was conducted; product, design, and engineering worked together (for the first time), and a working prototype was created. The suppliers liked the new experience.
Even though we attacked a small piece of the pie, an incremental plan was needed to build this solution to avoid disrupting normal operations and integrate with existing systems. The sprints began.
Benefit
This was far from a quick and easy solution. It was a continual peeling of an onion as each week identified other areas and dependencies that needed further investigation and design leadership.
However, the product teams were now forging stronger and more productive relationships with our top suppliers. This increased the trust and confidence of our suppliers to work with us now that they felt heard and saw the fruits of their feedback.
My efforts led to a greater awareness of the benefit of a 3-in-a-box approach, bringing design, product, and engineering together to create a solution. Pulling the key players together created greater unity and buy-in from all involved which produced a well thought out end product and sped product development by streamlining process and prioritizing features.
Result
Normally the efforts in a specific area, such as catalog management, would result in a more focused solution like improving how suppliers manage their product details. In this case, however, the efforts revealed too many opportunities in the end-to-end experience to ignore.
Our research and findings on the state of the infrastructure and holistic supplier experience got the attention of executive leadership. Thus the creation of an enterprise product design team was born.
Two years later, the team is over 60 members strong, including product designers, researchers, and content strategists, supported by a design system and a design operations team.
The irony is, I never did buy that wine fridge. Instead I ended up building one of the coolest teams I’ve ever worked with and surrounded myself with people who didn’t shy away from the cold hard facts.
