Designed a 0 to 1 AI-powered SaaS product for account managers of retail and consumer companies to plan and analyze trade activities for revenue growth.
My role
UX Designer
Duration
10+ months (2019)
Team I worked with
Product Manager, Full-stack developers
Tools used
Figma (design), InVision (handoff and prototypes)
Trade Pulse was a web-based AI-powered trade promotion management and optimization tool to help account managers at retail and consumer companies analyze and report trade promotion activities for a portfolio of products.
This product is now part of Caliper, an end-to-end portfolio planning tool for revenue growth management.
Pain Points:
Scaling trade activities
As businesses grow, account managers encounter difficulties in scaling their trade promotion activities, especially when dealing with global markets and diverse consumer bases.
Lack of data accuracy
When data is siloed or spread across multiple systems, account managers struggle to obtain accurate and comprehensive information. Hence, they find it challenging to predict the impact of trade promotions on sales and profits accurately.
Balancing multiple variables
Account managers must juggle various factors such as products, channels, areas, and SKUs while optimizing for volume, sales, and profit. This complexity makes it difficult to create effective promotion strategies.
Coordination w/ departments
Account managers often face difficulties in aligning goals and strategies with different stakeholders, leading to miscommunication and process inefficiencies.
Since this was a zero-to-one product at the time, we spent considerable time brainstorming the MVP’s functionality, aiming to balance technical feasibility, simplicity, and user intuitiveness.
Creating user flows was immensely helpful, providing a big-picture understanding of how things would work and allowing us to focus on different aspects of the flow in detail.
After multiple iterations, we finalized the following high-level user flow for the MVP’s functionality. Through collaboration with the product manager, I ensured each step was backed by strong technical and logical reasoning.
The next phase, one of the most critical stages of the project, involved designing a visual interface that was focused, minimal, effective, and easy to understand and interact with.
I began by expanding on the high-level user flow, focusing on detailed steps, and creating the most basic sketches. I iterated continuously from my team's feedback, and gradually adding visual complexity and polish to the designs.
This project lasted for over 10 months, involving multiple iterations and designing over 200 screens for Creating and Optimizing Trade Promotion Plans.
This MVP helped validate the initial product-market fit, leading to multiple proof-of-concept deals – clients include global Fortune 100s like Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, and Mars Wrigley.
The MVP served as a foundation for scaling into an end-to-end product called Caliper, that caters to diverse client needs and is an end-to-end portfolio planning tool for revenue growth management.