Story #1: Macy's as a Marketplace

Question 1

Interviewer Questions

Answer 1

1. Tell me about a time you made a design decision where a lot of people had agreed with you. Why did they agree with you?
   
   1. ​Are Right A Lot
2. Tell me about your proudest project.
   
   1. ​Deliver Results
3. Tell me about a time when you worked on a project outside of your scope.
   
   1. ​Ownership

Question 2

How will you open the story about Macy’s as a Marketplace?

Answer 2

Let me tell you about a time when I was able to Impact Macy’s vision of being more than just a department, and really more of a marketplace.

Question 3

Introduce the Situation.

Who are the users and what is the situation?

Answer 3

A Buyers is to research new fashion trends for Men, and get those trends items on to Macys.com - its about finding trend, and capitalizing trends and time is of the essence because trends don’t last very long..

the buyer works with Sellers like Christine, who make trendy men’s polos for the summer. Sellers are typically a small retailer who creates a trendy item and makes a pitch to Macy’s that the customer will love their items, so Macy’s buy the item from them and sell on their website. (Think Shark tank!).
Time is critical.. In order to capitalize on a trend and capture the sale we need to move fast..

Question 4

Whats the problem for Macy’s as a Marketplace?

Answer 4

Customer: When the customer comes to Macys.com to find a new trendy ite, she doesn’t see it up on the website. Macy’s loses a potential sale. Because.. speed to market is so slow.

If Brian identifies a New Seller (never worked with Macy’s before) the time it takes to get that new Seller’s product on to Macys.com is very long..
Right now we’re losing out on trends and potential sales.
Macy’s buyers also feel frustrated..
New Sellers feel frustrated…

Question 5

What’s the bad thing that happens if we can’t impact speed to market for Macy’s?

Answer 5

We are unable to provide the fashion forward customer experience that we want to offer.

With such long Approval and Setup times for new Sellers..approval and first sale, both new Sellers and Macy’s Buyers will lose out on new customer trends, potential sales and profit margin.

Question 6

Whats the good thing that happens if we can improve speed to market for Macys?

Answer 6

If New Vendors can get setup and approved more quickly, we create a great customer expeirence that features the newest trends while they’re intriguing for the customer. We can capitalize on sales and margin to help the business

Question 7

What hypothesis did I define for Macy’s Marketplace? What was my role?

Answer 7

I was the Product Manager for Supply Chain, and wanted to build a more efficient flow of Supply Chain information from New Vendors, to our Transportation Management Application.

I voluntarily stretched my ownership to New Vendor Onboarding.

“What if we better understand what’s causing a slower speed to market?”
“What New Seller’s and the Approval Process they go through today with the help of the OB team, so that we can identify opportunities to speed up the process, and redesign the Onboarding Platform to increase speed to market?”

Question 8

What actions did I take to solve this?

Answer 8

Step 1: Understand the current onboarding journey
* What happens today?
* How can we measure what happens today?

Step 2: Better understand the users involved - New Seller, Macy’s Buyers, and the Onboarding Team

Step 3: Build out the Ideal journey

Step 4: Build out a new design

Step 5: Measure & Iterate

Question 9

What framework do I use for Macy’s Marketplace?

Answer 9

Sitaution:
* User
* Problem
* Badthing, good thing

Action

Tasks

Results
* What I learned
* Tradeoffs,
* Done better?

Question 10

How did I get to understand the current onboarding journey?

Answer 10

Started by setting up a series of working groups with the key userds I was aware of - A couple of Buyers, a couple of Vendors, and the onboarding team (a team of 6 people)
We met with the Onboarding team to get an understanding of how the New Seller Setup and Approval Process works today.

Goal: Understand their current journey, their needs/painpoints, and their mental model (what are their decisions agnostic of system)

Question 11

STEP 1: How does the current onboarding journey work?

Answer 11

Current Journey summary: 4 Major steps, 15 total seps in detail, but communicaiton is almost exclusively managed through email - 5 back and forth emails from the OB team to the Seller.

Step 1:

• Create an Account to Get an Account Number & DUNs Number.
• Onboarding team sends an email to a new Vendor telling them to create an account username and password.
• Account username and password gets associated with an account number that is required to login.
  
  • Account is a Macy’s specific unique identifier.
• DUNS is a universal unique identifier for a small business. Used by finance.
• OB Team receives automated Account Setup comlete email.

Step 2:

• Onboarding team then emails the new Vendor to complete Compliance.
• Sent Compliance page
• Read and watch Seller Compliance Materials
• Agree to Compliance Materials
  
  • Fur Labeling Act
  • Wool Act & Rules
• OB Team receives automated vendor email when Compliance is done.

Step 3:

• Enter key supply chain information.
  
  • Carton size, Transportation Mode, Lead Time, Transit Address, etc.
  • EDI setup
  • Freight cost agreement
  • Packaging requirements
• Email sent to OB Team & Transportation & EDI team when SC Setup is Complete Complete

Step 4:

• OB Team emails Vendor and Buy when Vendor setup is complete.
• Buyer gets Department / Vendor Numbers so they can create a purchase order.

Question 12

STEP 2: How did I learn about New Sellers, Buyers, and OB team members really are.. needs and pain points?

New Sellers First.

Answer 12

New Seller - who are they? (Persona)
Action: We built a working group of New Sellers. To gather an understanding of needs and pain points, we asked a group of 20 New Sellers to participate in a series of calls over the course of 3 months, meeting twice a month.
Outcome:

Needs:

• *Transparency -** A clear understanding of exactly what information is needed to be approved and setup.
• *Clarity on whats next** - Clarity on where they stand at any point in time in the process.
• *Open and easy communication for questions** channel to ask questions about the process and materials needed.

Pain points:
Disorganized back and forth communication about questions on the approval process with the Onboarding Team
Introduction of a new partner - the Macy’s onboarding platform team and working with them to get answers and approval.
Lack of understanding on where they stand and what is holding them up.

Question 13

STEP 2: How did I learn about New Sellers, Buyers, and OB team members really are.. Buyers next.

Answer 13

What about the Buyers? - who are they (Persona)

Action: We built a working group of Macy’s Buyers to gather an understanding of needs and pain points. We met with the working group twice a month for 3 months

• Fashion Forward Departments - Women’s dresses, Girls Dresses, Men’s Dress Shirts, Girls Shirts and T Shirts

Needs:

• *Transparency** of where their Seller counterpart stands in the process of getting setup and approved.
• *Organization** - A centralized place to gather information about their Seller.

Pain points:
Time it takes to get approved.
Lack of clarity on process step Seller is in with Approvals - communication with the Onboarding team is difficult
Managing back and forth of communication with a Seller on Setup and Approval Questions.
What is the process today from your perspective

Question 14

STEP 2: How did I learn about New Sellers, Buyers, and OB team members really are.. OB Team next..

Answer 14

Needs/Pain Points:

• Organization - OB team needs a more time efficieicnt process, and a more organized structure
• Efficiency - Their day-to-day is around manging email communication between Buyers and Sellers
• Able to get tech data on metrics and build out that:

The setup start to final approval takes two weeks on average.

Question 15

STEP 3: What ideal journey was I able to build out?

Answer 15

The process really calls for 2 major steps -

1. Provide General Vendor Information

• Fill in business information such as primary contacts and type of business

2. Complete Vendor Compliance

• Changes - Videos and materials stayed largely the same.
• Read and watch Seller Compliance Materials
• Agree to Compliance Materials

3. Complete Supply Chain Setup

• Supply Chain Requirements -
• Transit Address
• Transit mode (LTL)
• Carton requirements
• Lead time
• Enable Load tendering - achieve the best shipping rate

Question 16

STEP 4: How did I propose a new design? Did everyone agree?

Answer 16

Summary: I created a web-based platform to do the following:

• Centralized all steps to one platform, one system in the format of a visual checklist. - as opposed to two before.
• Sreamlined question communication with FAQ and an open comments sestions. - took away email communication.
  
  • A Comments section allows New Sellers to ask questions directly to the Onboarding Team and notifies the onboarding team via notification on the platform.
• Built a virtual checklist of steps below.
  
  • Each step has the following status options:
    
    • Not Started
    • In Progress
    • Complete

ARE RIGHT A LOT

Question 17

Step 4: What did we build?

Answer 17

1. Start Setup

2. Create Seller Account

• Fill in business information such as primary contacts and type of business
• Changes:
  
  • Account number and Duns are no longer leveraged front-end. Only backend.
  • Vendor name is now associated and email are now the primary ways to access an account.
  • Instead of email communication, statuses are reflected in a checklist.
    
    • Not Start
    • In Progress
    • Complete
• Question Section:
  
  • Comment section allows for question and answering.

3. Fill out and Agree to Compliance:

• Changes - Videos and materials stayed largely the same.
• Read and watch Seller Compliance Materials
• Agree to Compliance Materials

4. Fill out Supply Chain Requirements:

• In the same platform, not redirected to 3rd party application. 3rd party supply chain app is updated in real time via API.
• Transit Address
• Transit mode (LTL)
• Carton requirements
• Lead time
• EDI Compliance
• Enable Load tendering - achieve the best shipping rate

5. Complete Vendor Setup:

• Buyer can see a department and vendor number to send a PO.
• Vendor can receive a PO through EDI.

Question 18

What tradeoffs did we consider with the design?

Answer 18

Was moving away from email the right decision? Was there value to getting that email notification to prompt you to go back to the portal?
Was a comments section really the right way to address questions and answers? Would the onboarding team know when a question was submitted?
With more money could we build an automated chatbot to answer most questions?

Question 19

Step 5: How do you Measure & Iterate?

Answer 19

Deployment: Big Bang - we had to deploy the platform at the same time, we couldn’t do a staggered rollout. We couldn’t have both platform run in parallel, it was too expensive.

• This was a drawback, ideally we could do a staggered roll out but we couldn’t have two platforms running in parallel.

1. Gathered qualitative feedback

• Met with a group of 7 New Sellers to get feedback on the new process.

2. Gather quantitative feedback

• Sent two surveys 1 and 2 months post delivery to gather feedback.
• Used a UI tag and Adobe Analytics to measure what functions that we build were highly leveraged versus which were not.
• Measure Setup to Approval
• Measure Setup for First Sales

Question 20

Whats the structure of results?

Answer 20

* Restate the goal / hypothesis
* What did I learn?
* What could have gone better?

Question 21

What were the results?

Answer 21

DELIVER RESULTS

“What if we better understand New Seller’s and the Approval Process they go through today, so that we can identify opportunities to speed up the process, and redesign the Onboarding Platform to increase speed to market?”

We started as..
The setup start to final approval takes two weeks on average.
The setup start to the first sale takes 9.5 weeks on average.

We improved to..
We reduced setup start to final approval from two weeks on average to just 6 business days on average.
Why not by more?
We have a people constraint. Ultimately somebody on the Macy’s compliance team and operations teams need to review and approve a new seller.
We reduced setup start to first sale from 9.5 weeks on average to just 8 weeks on average.
Why not by more?
Setup start to first sale will always consider a significant lead time - Lead time we consider features Item production and Transit time from Seller to a Gap distribution center

OUTCOME: The Macy’s customer is finding more of what she wants when she goes on to Macy’s.com. Shes having a better customer experience, and becoming more of a loyal shopper.