Supply chain solution
Established a clear vision for an ambiguous 0-1 commerce platform, delivering an order mgmt. system in 7 months and generating 150+ merchant prospects.
Work
Supply Chain @ FedEx Dataworks
Project Duration
11 months and ongoing (2024)
Role
Product Design Lead
Collaboration
Product, Engineering, Research, SMEs, Sales, Marketing, & Customer Success
Context
Problem Space
Merchants use multiple 3P platforms for different aspects of their e-commerce operations, resulting in a lack of end-to-end journey, which leads to frustration and increased costs.
Solution
FDX is a data-driven commerce platform developed by FedEx to enhance customer experiences across the entire purchasing journey.
Impact
Announced at NRF in Jan 2024, that led to 150+ merchant prospects, we are currently working with reference customers in private preview mode.
Please reach out for more information.
Vision
Unified FDX platform
My task was to envision how we can alleviate merchant pain points by designing an interconnected experience that addressed inefficiencies and frustrations caused by fragmented post-purchase processes across orders, shipments, inventory, and returns.
How might we?
Ensure that we are building a unified platform which is easily accessible for merchants while delivering a seamless and exceptional customer experience.
Final vision
Strategy
How did I build the vision?
My strategy involved user research, data and competitive case studies, user workflows, team alignment and design systems thinking. I focussed on three aspects that would lead to a holistic interconnected user experience.
Consistent
Building a consistent experiences for different types of users and across different products. This involved team collaboration and systems thinking.
Scalable
Every aspect/feature of the product should be built to scale in future. Go broad before you prioritize. This involved competitive analysis and reasearch.
Easy to use
Merchants should find it very easy to find information and take actions. This involved team collaboration and interaction design.
Actions & Impact
Scenario 1
Finding the right audience
We had tons of data so identifying our primary, secondary and tertiary audience was crucial.
My actions
I led a design exercise with 1 designer & researcher to navigate 8+ personas studies, previous discovery research and value proposition decks.
Impact
In less than a month, we had primary personas identified and customer journeys mapped to empower cross functional teams to align on a singular goal for our target audience.
Understand primary audience
This exercise helped me understand similarities and differences between users of all business spaces. Not only did this exercise help with building scalable experiences but allowed me to focus and prioritize specific efforts at different stages of product development.
Understand the end to end customer journey
The journey mapping* gave me a good understanding of merchants' needs from onboarding to promoting the platform to others.
*Please reach out for detailed customer journey mapping.
Scenario 2
Team Alignment
I realized multiple team pods were working in silos even though there was a huge overlap and interconnectivity between features.
My actions
I led an onsite workshop that brought together 7+ product teams (30+ cross functional roles) across FDX to identify customer touch-points and overarching vision.
Impact
After aligning on the vision, we delivered a market-ready MVP of a fully interconnected orders experience in 7 months and started onboarding a major sportswear brand.
Team input on customer’s touch points
Gathered input from 7+ feature teams to uncover opportunities* and highlight dependencies.
Collaborated heavily with product and engineering counterparts at this time.
This laid out the all the features that we have a potential to develop and that eventually will lead to our vision.
*Please reach out for detailed customer touch points.
Team alignment
Led a white-boarding session with 7+ feature teams (30+ people) to visualize, and refine ideas and to plan our next steps.
I spearheaded this onsite exercise fostering team alignment and establishing workflows that became the foundation for our product development phases.
Scenario 3
Inconsistent experiences
With multiple initiatives running in parallel, we had designs all over the place that led to inconsistent UI and interactions across different product lines within FDX
My actions
I led a design exercise with 2 designers to curate all data heavy/table experiences across FedEx and FDX. Once I had all the data I needed, I started building a design system for data heavy components.
Impact
This approach saved the design systems team a month of research and development, enabling feature teams to directly implement consistent components without waiting for the systems to be built.
Step 1
Curate all FDX experiences
Since most post-purchase merchant activities are data heavy, I worked with 2 designers on curating tables across the platform to identify similarities and edge scenarios.
Step 2
Understand best practices
We started ideating on enhancing our table experiences. We identified best practices and trends for different aspects of data heavy experiences.
Step 3
Build components
After usability studies, I began creating components that aligned with user expectations and adhered to the design system foundations.
I worked with the engineering team to integrate these newly designed components into our system.
Scenario 4
Customer Feedback
We wanted to customer feedback to refine and iterate our MVP experiences
My actions
I built a research roadmap and worked with a researcher to conduct 5+ moderated and unmoderated user researches on usertesting.com
Impact
We were able to identify next set of features to build as well as what was working well vs. needed improvement even before we engaged with paying customers.
"I would love to see orders for specific stores & customize you know what I can see. Like can I add a note for last mile delivery to an order?”
"Design is clean and icons are very easy to understand. I like the color coding on order status: Red color tells me something is not right.”
User Feedback
Future features
We are working with reference customers to polish the experience as per their unique needs (while building a holistic structure)
Build insights and analytics for orders
An overview dashboard for merchant’s entire business. E.g. Avg. weekly orders and avg. amount per order.
Content customization
Merchants can personalize their order view to show/hide different types of information
Bringing shipments + returns directly on the orders experience
Similar to fulfillment feature, merchants will be able to see shipments and returns overview without leaving orders experience!
Other work I am proud of
Fulfillment
Built the market ready order fulfillment ecosystem. This feature allows merchants to enable fulfillment capabilities, setup pre-requisites like carriers, packages, and shipping rules and allows fulfillment from the orders experience.
Product & Inventory Mgmt.
Leading the product & inventory management system within FDX. This project involves large scale product data input from merchants, international customs clearance, inventory admin experience and inventory integrations using 3rd party tools. 15+ retail brands onboarded on product catalog.
International Clearance
Led design vision and end-to-end execution of the global customs clearance experience, positioning FDX as a top platform for SMB international shipping, resulting in 120+ signed contracts and 20+ active international shippers to date.
FedEx Freight
Built a 0-1 proof of concept (north star idea) for new freight opportunities for executive visioning.
