Digital Transformation Electronic Catalogs

Have you ever bought a door? I would venture to guess that most people haven't and don't really know where to start. That is why it is really important to make the quoting process in the electronic retail catalogs as simple as possible.

There are two recurring personas that get brought up to help us think about who is the intended audience of these catalogs. First, we liked to ask if your grandma could understand every step of the process. The idea here is to think of someone who may not be handy or technical. If your grandma is either or both of those things I apologize there is no offense intended. Second, is a store associate who just came over from the paint department.

In both cases the people interacting with the catalogs do not know about doors so you should not assume they know these terms. If we can reasonably use common language for things we should. If we cannot reasonably describe millwork things for the public there should be good visual representation and informative links to get folks up to speed fast.

Project Objective

The objectives of the project were to modernize and improve the user experience of the electronic product configurators used to sell Interior and Exterior doors at large retail home improvement stores (The Home Depot and Lowe’s). This included simplifying the product offering, reducing and rewording questions and answers, creating over 500 hundred new images, recalculating pricing, and ensuring orders received flowed seamlessly into the companies ERP (enterprise resource planning) software. Once execution started the plan was to deliver all this within six to nine months.

Before

Before this project was implemented the catalogs had a number of issues but chief among them were a confusing set of questions and answers, images that looked like an engineer made them (because they did), and pricing that had got out of alignment with the market and material costs.

Outcome

The outcome was a simpler and easier to navigate quoting experience with better visuals and a more competitive price point. We saw a 40% increase in sales year over year in the months following the full roll out of these changes.

My role

My role was the Product Owner of the electronic catalogs.

My responsibilities

I worked with the project manager and stakeholders to collect requirements and determine the project scope. This involved many hours going through various configuration paths within the catalog and identifying question and answers that needed rewording and images that needed to be redone. Often we would deliberate as a group to find the must customer friendly to relay technical millwork terms.

The number of questions in a configuration was long compared to competitors both in the number of selections that needed to be made and the questions with no choice that you had to scroll past. I worked with the team to decide which questions could be removed, reworded, and in some places hidden until the full description displayed. In some cases the visible questions were reduced by a third eliminating minutes from the time to configure.

I then worked with the catalog team of eight developers and four QA specialists to break down the requests into stories. With my experience doing this sort of work myself I have a pretty good intuition for where to break up tasks but this too was a team effort.

From there I worked with other teams to determine the timing of their deliverables when they were dependencies for the work being done by the catalog team. We cannot implement marketing materials until they have been created or pricing until it has been calculated for example.

Maintaining integration with the company's ERP was a high priority item, so we first focused on making changes that could impact that integration. This part can be contentious so I helped resolve conflicts that arose and ensure work was getting done on time. Issues arose around availability of resources and your occasional personality disagreements. I find demonstrating an understanding of the difficulties everyone is experiencing goes a long way.

The first release to production included the simplification of product and questions along with some preliminary marketing support. This existed as a soft launch of the new style of catalog and once the initial discomfort with change had subsided the feedback was largely positive.

Once that rolled out and pricing had completed their recalculations we pulled in the new pricing and used automated testing to validate the catalog and ERP were in sync. Some changes to the pricing theory necessitated additional changes to the catalog but this was accounted for in the project plan.

I worked alongside the sales team to discuss the pricing changes with the retailers as this update would change the price of everything. Once we were confident the catalog was pricing things as expected and the customers agreed the catalogs were rolled out in stores and the ERP system was updated to reflect the new pricing.

Before closing out the project I did find a few high priority items that came up after the catalogs had gone live so we HAD a few sprints dedicated to those issues as well as including some additional marketing support.

I finally closed the project by doing one last sprint retrospective where I asked the team to think about the project as a whole. I used the lessons learned from this project to change the way I interacted with stakeholders, establishing a more frequent cadence for priority review and status updates.

Deliverables

The deliverable of the project was the Interior and Exterior catalogs underwent a digital transformation and were rolled out in over 2000 retail stores where they are were used to quote and sell doors.

The rest of the organization was also supporting the roll out of the retail catalog program with in store marketing materials and territory sales promoting it in stores in person.

Lessons Learned

Working through this project really highlighted how off the mark we had been previously around communication. By necessity we had built out a communication plan for this project and the next few months of business as usual went much smoother because we had a good process. We met every other week now to review the status of work in progress and priority of future changes. Demos were performed as the work was completed to get confirmation we were still aligned.

I do wish I could have seen the things that had taken shape here applied across the other brands. One thing we had decided early on in this process was we were not just figuring out how to make the JW Exterior and JW Interior catalogs.

We were developing a standard that would then be applied across the board. This included what questions and answers are we asking, how we display the configuration, and high quality artwork when words will just not do.

Find the right way to sell this product and deviate as little from that for the ABS and MMI brands. There is some synergy around image assets for sure but one of the biggest benefits would have been for developers. If there is only one way of doing something it is a lot easier to make changes and to troubleshoot issues. The framework remains the blueprint for the other brands in the JW family.

One thing I am especially proud of is the negotiation I did with the retailers to allow us to deviate from their standard answer size for the door glass option. We had to resize every glass image and code all the necessary rules to make it happen but we were able to set the answer images to the exact piece of glass you were selecting.

Having done a lot of image work prior to this project the team had a tool that allowed us to take the visualization images, that are used for compositing the finished product, and resize them for use as answer images. There were over 400 unique images that needed to be resized and then called correctly based on the context of the configuration that was being built at the time.

No other catalog at the time was doing this, at least not at the scale that we had executed. The merchants liked this so much that Lowe's actually made this their standard and updated their white papers. My favorite part is that it is just so much nicer for the customer to see the right thing from the start. It eliminated a potential for having to guess and check or click off onto an external PDF.

The world of retail catalogs is not going to stop while you overhaul your offering. The team did all of this while also working on a Lowe's configurable ecomm project that utilized the retail catalogs to sell custom unit online at Lowes.com.

What I learned

It was part of the lessons learned but a big takeaway from me has been about the level and quality of communication. It differs by stakeholder but finding the sweet spot with each person makes things go so much smoother.

I prefer to think about something and once my opinion is mostly formed let it out. Others prefer to talk it out from the start. Understanding that the idea is being worked on verbally and may not be formed exactly takes some getting use to but can be very helpful to understand.

This is day 31 of 100 Days To Offload.