Creating a Multi Team Data Platform for Informed Business Decisions

The Problem:

The realty department of a large retailer was unable to make timely, informed decisions about the health and management of their stores due to lack of access to data and rapid changes in business goals. The data they they currently had was spread out across multiple teams and applications. These applications were slow, cumbersome, and did not always contain the most up-to-date data. The business was also starting to reevaluate the effectiveness of their current programs and strategy, but did not currently have the data metrics needed to make proactive decisions or a way to view that data.

Our Process & Solution:

Our team worked with a variety of teams to build on cohesive data source for the entire department. Through a series of user interviews and stakeholder interviews, we designed an MVP that included the most important information for day-to-day use. We then used card-sorting exercising and usability studies to back up these findings pre-launch.

After launching the MVP, we did a second round of discovery and exploratory research to expand the learn more about the evolving business goals. Through this research we learned that the team needed to be more proactive rather than reactive in their decision making. We worked collaboratively with the finance and operations teams to create a new set of metrics that allowed the department to monitor the ROI of different business initiatives in a more timely manner and make data driven decisions.