PaCMan, Home Depot's Price and Cost Management tool, allows store and online merchandising planners to set prices for the products they manage.
My Role
When I joined the PaCMan team in April 2019 the product had already been released to a subset of Merchandising Planners whose subclasses of skus were converted from the legacy system. My Product Manger, Dustin Logan, had been on the team since October of 2018 and was working through an existing roadmap.
At the time the product consisted of four overarching steps: generating an excel worksheet, creating price changes in the worksheet, uploading the sheet back into PaCMan and transmitting the changes.
To better understand how MPs were making price change decisions - and all of the steps throughout the process - I began my research with an observational study.
The Merchandising Planner
(findings from our observations)
During our observational research we found that MPs spend a lot of their time on unnecessary steps such as downloading, working in and uploading excel worksheets. Once they have uploaded the worksheet they do not have all the visibility into if their price change is transmitting as expected, causing them to download additional worksheets to gain that visibility.
After discussing our findings, my Product Manager and I decided that we would conduct additional research to get the business on-board with eliminating excel as the main method for creating price changes. Because we will not be able to solve for every use of excel we will still have the option for them to export a .csv file.
Doing this will streamline the process MPs go through to make a price change and provide them more insights into the status of their changes. From a product development standpoint it will shorten the release cycles allowing us to add more value faster. From a design and product strategy standpoint it opens up more opportunities to integrate with other products in the space.
Testing our findings
Our observational research sparked conversations about eliminating excel from our user's process. To better understand if Merchandising Planners would want to continue making price changes in the UI we ran an experiment by adding a primary button to the worksheet generator screen that would allow them to continue in PaCMan.
If the user selects the button a new window containing a survey would open asking if the users would like to make price changes within the UI. To further understand what users were expecting by clicking the button we then followed up with an interview.
