Data Driven Merchandising

Overview

Nike’s merchandising teams managed hundreds of product plans entirely offline, relying on pen-and-paper workflows and disparate data sources. This lack of integration caused millions in rework and miscommunication, creating significant inefficiencies.Merchants struggled to make informed decisions due to siloed data, limited visibility, and friction in collaboration. The existing process lacked real-time insights, predictive analytics, and compliance guardrails, leading to costly errors.

Key Problems

    Merchants needed a unified tool to streamline decision-making and improve collaboration with upstream and downstream stakeholders.
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    Hundreds of products were planned manually using pen-and-paper processes, leading to inefficiencies and version control issues.
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    Ineffective communication and disconnected processes led to millions in rework and misaligned merchandising strategies.
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    Critical decision-making data was scattered across multiple sources, making it difficult for teams to access insights in real time.

    Role

    Lead Product Designer
    User Research | Workshops | Wireframing | Prototypes | Visual Design

    Tools

    Figma
    Miro
    Design Sprint

    Research

    UX
    Strategy

    Empathy and understanding

    Gathering insights

    • Understand goals and scope from the merchandising operations.
    • Develop a deep understanding for merchants, PLM's and their pain points
    • Look for opportunities to innovate and provide business value.
    • Define problems and how they fit business needs.

    Understand business goals

    Partnering with global merch ops

    Line Planning is a core part of how Nike's business plans products with strategy. Having a deep understanding of where they want to be in the future required partnering heavily with the business teams to understand their goals and define scope. Through several knowledge sessions, our team identified long term goals and how we could compartmentalize the work to conduct research and design in phases.

    Selected questions from interviews
    • If you were to describe your job to someone unfamiliar, what would be your elevator pitch?
    • What are the key responsibilities for your role?
    • Visualize you're at your desk, what main tools are you using to complete you job?
    • Describe a typical day. What is your first step?
    • How is your team made up? Who do you partner with?
    • What information do you need to do your job?
    • What parts about your job are difficult today?
    • If you could change one thing about the way you work, what would it be?

    Empathize with merchants

    User Interviews

    In order to understand who I was designing for, I partnered with an insights lead to conduct a series of user interviews to develop a fundamental understanding around how they do their jobs. The focus of this was to step into their shoes and start to uncover the ways they work, pain points, and partnerships.

    goals defined

    Iterate

    UX and Visual
    improvements

    Discover & Define

    get to know users and merchandising

    Working with the development team, we combined usability testing with various customer insights to determine the best way to integrate new features into the visual design.

    Understand THe problem

    planning Hundreds of products on a whiteboard

    Before this project began, Nike merchants planned all of their products mostly offline and through emails. I came in as the lead product designer to help discover how technology could power line planning of the future. Through several knowledge-sharing sessions and observing lineplanning workshops, we quickly learned that the team relied heavily on white-boarding sessions to visualize and shape their plan each season.

    GEtting to know merchants

    Interviews, surveys, User flows

    During the interviews it became clear how there were multiple roles that made up a merchant at Nike. So we focused on understanding how they overlapped and where the key moments for collaboration were across the process.

    Selected questions from interviews
    • If you were to describe your job to someone unfamiliar, what would be your elevator pitch?
    • What are the key responsibilities for your role?
    • How is your team organized? Who do you partner with?
    • What parts about your job are difficult today?
    • If you could change one thing about the way you work, what would it be?
    • How does your job look over the course of a season?

    Mapping Tasks and Defining goals

    Workshops, User Journey mapping, task flows

    The business process changes constantly based on the seasonality of the team's deliverables. To observe changes during various stages of the their workflow, we met with the team at regular intervals. We captured pain points, objectives and got a sense for where the friction was in their process each season.

    goals defined

    User Journey Map

    With a holistic view of the merchant journey, several opportunities were revealed from their insights. I worked with the business team and merch ops to prioritize which of the opportunities to implement first to deliver the most value with the least effort.

    Prioritizing opportunities

    With a holistic view of the merchant journey, several opportunities were revealed from their insights. I worked with the business team and merch ops to prioritize which of the opportunities to implement first to deliver the most value with the least effort.

    Goals & Opportunities

    Research

    UX
    Strategy

    Test & Iterate

    Build the right thing

    Working with the development team, we combined usability testing with various customer insights to determine the best way to integrate new features into the visual design.

    Highlighting the voice of the user

    Each feature and capability required a different way of collaborating with users. For some, leaving the details out of the conversation led to more insights into how they worked. For others, we used mock data in high fidelity to simulate real-world scenarios to ensure feedback was easy to contribute and understand.

    Low fidelity - High fidelity

    validating layouts and flows

    Each feature and upgrade required a different way of working with users. Oftentimes leaving the details out of the conversation led to more insight into how they would like to use the app while other times we used mock data to simulate a working tool.

    Prototyping impactful decision making

    Creating prototypes helped us test ideas and layouts, and could be used to validate whether the user flows we designed would work for making decisions. We would conduct A/B testing or get users to interact with the prototypes given a prompt to make sure we got the best insights for the problem at hand.

    Laying the groundwork for Nikes enterprise design system

    Partnering with my engineering team, we created reusable components that allowed for visual consistency and common UX patterns across enterprise tools. This library eventually evovled into supporting 10+ Nike applications.

    Information Architecture

    The right data at the right time

    Merchant teams consistently agreed that having better data for decision making would help their teams plan

    Iterate

    UX and Visual
    improvements

    Visual design

    Working with the development team, we combined usability testing with various customer insights to determine the best way to integrate new features into the visual design.

    Results

    Takeaways

    Credits: Merch Ops | Line Planning Tech Ops | LPX Development Team

    Home

    Where to next?

    A skyscraper that grows farms.
    A community design non-profit.
    An explosive hot sauce brand.
    A visual team management tool.
    Made from scratch using Webflow.
    Top
    Discovery
    Research
    Test & Iterate
    Visual Design
    Takeaways