Context or Challenge

Merchant teams spent more than 262,000 hours annually validating promotions manually. The workflow required users to inspect pricing, inventory, promotion status, and customer-facing readiness across disconnected systems, reducing time available for strategic business work.

Observation

The organization did not simply have a reporting gap. Users lacked a fast, trusted way to confirm that a promotion was accurate and ready for customers.

Insight

More data would not fix the workflow. The solution needed to reduce decision friction and make the next action clear.

My Thinking

I focused on consolidating the most important readiness signals into one experience, translating technical data into merchant-friendly guidance, and designing enablement at the same time as the product.

What I Built or Led

I designed and launched an enterprise reporting product that centralized promotion quality assurance, pricing and inventory signals, promotional metadata, and readiness visibility. Supporting automation converted exported data into standardized merchant comments and accelerated downstream analysis. The design-thinking process behind that consolidation is shown below.

Featured Capability: Design-Thinking-Driven Automation

  • Ran user research with 10+ site merchants and cross-functional partners to confirm the real bottleneck was fragmented signals, not a lack of data
  • Modeled pricing, inventory, promotional, and content-quality signals into one governed, near real-time source of truth using SQL-based data consolidation
  • Designed an intuitive, filterable interface built around how site merchants actually worked, replacing item-by-item manual page clicking with bulk extraction
  • Paired the dashboard with a formula-driven template that auto-generated QA comments, removing hand-typed notes from the workflow entirely

Technology Behind the Tool

  • SQL (conditional, decision-tree-based item classification)
  • BigQuery-based enterprise data warehouse integration
  • Automated, near real-time data consolidation
  • Rule-based readiness flags (promotional, low-inventory, content-incomplete, and other states)
  • Formula-driven auto-commenting automation
  • Filterable BI dashboard design

How It Works, Behind the Scenes

The starting point was user research, not a dashboard. Working directly with 10+ site merchants and cross-functional partners surfaced the real bottleneck: pricing, inventory, promotional status, and content-quality signals lived in disconnected systems and had to be checked one product page at a time. The fix modeled those signals into a single, governed, near real-time source of truth in BigQuery, using a chain of conditional checks to classify each item -- flagging it as promotional, low-inventory, content-incomplete, or another readiness state -- so the right owner could act without manually cross-referencing systems. That source of truth was wrapped in an intuitive filterable interface, and paired with a formula-driven template that auto-generated QA comments instead of requiring them to be typed by hand.

Flow diagram: site merchants individually inspected every live product page and variant, then hand-documented findings -- a manual process. User research with 10+ site merchants and cross-functional partners identified the real bottleneck as fragmented signals, not a lack of data. Pricing, inventory, promotion, and content-quality signals were then modeled into one governed, near real-time source of truth. An intuitive, filterable dashboard plus a formula-driven auto-commenting template replaced manual clicking and hand-typed notes. The result: a multi-hour, multi-person weekly process became a single-owner, 30-minute workflow.
A simplified view of the design-thinking-to-automation process behind the Active Promotions Report. Exact systems, formulas, and data sources are intentionally generalized for this public case study.
Download the one-pager (PDF-ready) →

Launch or Adoption Strategy

Adoption was treated as part of the product, not a post-launch activity. I created user documentation, a data glossary, FAQs, workflow instructions, walkthrough content, spreadsheet automation, and training for more than 400 associates. The product was certified by an e-commerce analytics organization and scaled across the enterprise.

Business Impact

  • Adopted by 2,800+ users
  • Reduced manual effort by 99.4%
  • Generated approximately $1.6M in annual savings
  • Trained 400+ associates across multiple business units

Key Takeaway

“The product's value was not another dashboard. The value was replacing a fragmented, low-confidence workflow with a scalable way to verify promotional readiness.”

Capabilities Demonstrated

  • Customer discovery
  • User research
  • SQL-based data modeling
  • Workflow design
  • Product development
  • Value translation
  • Enablement
  • Change management
  • Product adoption
  • Cross-functional leadership
  • E-commerce operations