Sam’s Club Task Management System
Improving merchant productivity, collaboration, and visibility across workflows with platform time-management tools.
ROLE
Lead Designer
TEAM
1 Project Manager, 4 Product Owners, 6 Engineers
TIMEFRAME
10 months
The challenge
Enable improved merchant productivity by creating net new platform-level time management tools within Sam’s Club’s Fusion Launchpad ecosystem of merchandising apps, thereby drastically increasing the platform’s value.
The idea for “improved productivity” was aimed not at micro-managing these power users, but at helping them save and better manage their time on tactical and manually cumbersome work to free up more time for strategic opportunities—like looking at market trends of the items in their category and visiting clubs in person to see how product looks on the shelf—referred to as the “art of merchandising.”
The task system was the first part of this multi-product initiative, intending to streamline work to be done for merchants.
The result
MVP Phase I
Detail design delivery & dev hand offAimed at centralizing deadlines into a single, clear view for each merchant to understand what’s in-flight across their various workflows and applications, to improve their organization and planning, with a focus on marketing event processes.
MVP Phase II
Concept deliveryExpanded to encompass the end-to-end task lifecycle—from task assignment, to in-app status triggers, to approvals and rejections. Incorporated multi-user collaboration and visibility across workflows and user roles at different scopes.
Research & discovery
User interviews
Although this was intended to be a system that was utilized by all Fusion Launchpad users (including Marketing, Pricing, Cost, and Space Planning), we focused on merchants because they are the central hub of communication for their category of ownership.
We conducted 12 user interviews with merchants to gain an understanding of how work is currently communicated and tracked.
User communication channels
Our user interviews focused heavily on screen-sharing examples of their current ways of receiving communication about work to be done, and subsequently how they track that.
For the majority of their workflows, we saw that merchants spend hours reading through hundreds of emails about what tasks need to be done, what is actually relevant to them personally, follow-ups and check-ins with others, requesting status updates, and generally trying to maintain an awareness of what is in-flight across their category.
We gathered that a lot of their “tactical” work revolved around the need to bounce from tool to tool to understand what requires their attention due to ineffective communication methods.
Current ways of tracking tasks
After spending hours just understanding what needs to be done, merchants will organize folders in their email to reference these documents constantly—the various requirements and deadlines in a workflow, important item-related data, and jump-off links to go accomplish the work in different tools.
Though each user naturally works a bit differently, we saw a common theme of users making their own manual daily to-do lists and planners of what’s most important, in an attempt to centralize the work.
This manual deciphering and tracking results in merchants missing some pretty critical deadlines, which can have a drastic effect on Sam’s Club’s business.
User needs takeaways
Merchants largely expressed a desire to remove this type of communication out of their inbox, and a way to more easily understand what is actually required of them personally, rather than emails sent out to all in the company. Our goal within Fusion was to centralize this communication into one place, be more of a connecting thread throughout these workflows in understanding everything that’s going on, and making experiences and communication more personalized to the individual.
Connecting point solutions
Provide a connecting thread throughout merchant work to better manage what’s ongoing and what needs to be done through fragmented workflows and tools.
Effective communication
Reducing ineffective communication in the form of deciphering and organizing task-related emails, follow-ups and status updates, and awareness of what’s going on across their category.
Personalized experiences
Making sure the right communication goes to the right users based on a combination of role and status.
Role-based task assignment
To personalize the task system experience, we had to zoom out to look at the system as a whole and how each user in a workflow connects within it.
When looking at competitor task-tracking applications on the market, we quickly realized these use cases were a lot more complicated than what we audited, where tasks were assigned from one individual to another. Instead, tasks at Sam’s Club were often assigned from an entire team that requires shared visibility, like Marketing, and sent out on a category-basis, meaning each merchant needed to receive their own task to complete.
What we discovered was that to ensure tasks were personalized to the right individual, they needed to be assigned based on a unique combination of team, role, region, category, and subcategories, so that we were sending work to a type of person that needs to complete it—with the system identifying who fits that bill—rather than a specific user ID.
This was critical to success for a few reasons.
First, it meant communication would be more personalized to the user—Marketing could more easily send out their tasks just to the merchants & categories participating in a certain event instead of sending it to everyone, without added work on their part.
It also allowed for the system to adapt when a user went on a leave of absence or changed their desk (category), by re-assigning it to the new person that fit those same requirements, so that the workflows we established in the system wouldn’t become outdated or broken.
Creating a task hierarchy model
Through analyzing user workflows, we realized the task system needed to provide different scopes of communication and monitoring based on different user roles and their category groupings—from teams who need to monitor task progress across all users and categories, to a manager who needs to review and sign-off on the task for a smaller subset of categories, to an individual contributor who needs to complete the task for a single category.
So we created a model where assigning a single task actually spawns off duplicate tasks and subtasks to each individual contributor so they can complete it on their own, and allowed different user roles access to viewing workflows at different scopes, from granular to roll-up views.
MVP Phase I Design
Centralization of key deadlines
Through iterative concept design and user validation, we delivered two phases of an MVP for the task management system—the first was aimed at centralizing the various communication channels into a single, clear view for merchants to understand their deadlines across workflows and apps to improve their organization and planning. We focused on this first because the disjointed and disorganized communication channels were one of the biggest pain points that merchants expressed.
We knew that we were never going to replace jotting down a to-do list on a notepad for all day-to-day happenings, but the intent was to get the critical deadlines from key workflows, like marketing event preparation and planogram creation, into one place to help merchants stay on top of work that’s being asked of them when there are crucial downstream effects.
This phase was delivered to our engineering partners and is currently in development.
Layers of context
We organized this communication into different layers to promote quick visual intake and scannability, so that when landing on this dashboard, the user could quickly understand what’s critical across different workflows according to due date.
To get a more granular understanding of an individual task, the user could then open up the detail panel to view additional notes, attachments, and other context needed to get the work done.
Supporting key workflows
A feature that received a lot of excitement and positivity from both user and business stakeholders was the addition of displaying which tasks across different users are dependent on each other in the details panel, so that users can see if someone is waiting on them or if they’re waiting on someone else to complete work and what the status is.
Pulling this cross-user visibility into the Fusion task system prevented users from having to jump over to external communication channels and spend time sending and receiving follow-ups.
We also delivered detailed workflows to create a system that seamlessly worked with both Fusion Launchpad apps and non-integrated tools—such as external spreadsheets—including key merchant workflows like event preparation and planogram creation.
We worked with our engineering partners to understand available triggers in existing partner applications that could be leveraged to automatically update the status of tasks, keeping the task system communication as real-time as possible and lessening work for users to navigate back to Fusion and manually mark tasks as complete.
Detail design documentation
Our MVP Phase I delivery included detailed edge case and state design for 7 core documentation areas, including a breakdown of the dashboard and detail panel, along with flows for updating task statuses, filtering and searching through tasks, and more—ensuring a fully functional experience for the first product release.
We had twice-a-week syncs with our engineering partners to review design work in progress throughout the program to ensure alignment on engineering constraints as we worked, as well as providing design VQA support as Phase I was being developed.
MVP Phase II Design
End-to-end system design
The second phase of the MVP was aimed at expanding to encompass the end-to-end task lifecycle and identifying what views and features were required to accomplish that—from task assignment, to being completed based on in-app triggers, to approving and rejecting tasks, and the continuous monitoring throughout the process—along with making sure that this would be a system that worked to accommodate all of the core teams and processes that merchants have to interact with at Sam’s Club.
Collaboration, visibility, and real-time updates
A major theme in these views was adding in the necessary collaboration and visibility across workflows and user roles, to add onto the single assignee’s experience from the first phase.
This meant providing real-time updates and communication tools to keep creators & receivers aligned and informed throughout the workflow through features like commenting, audit logs, adding tasks to a watchlist, and notification updates.
We also evolved the system past assignee perspectives to include user roles who needed more high-level monitoring views, but aren’t directly responsible for completing the tasks.
We created a dashboard for task creators who needed to monitor progress across tasks of different workflows, like Marketing teams monitoring all tasks related to setting up different events. This view allowed them to gauge how on-track events were based on task progression, and allowed them to drill into individual tasks to see a breakdown of assignee progress, so they could be immediately aware of any blockers.
We also delivered capabilities for manager-level roles to be able to review and either approve or reject tasks from their direct reports, keeping communication efficient within the system rather relying on emails.
Through validation with other individual contributor roles apart from merchants, we discovered that some user roles needed a more in-depth breakdown of their tasks due to the fact that they were responsible for multiple categories, whereas merchants only owned a single category.
For these roles, we created a breakdown of subtasks within a single task—each subtask attributed to a single category—so that roles like replenishers could see the status of their tasks according to each category they managed.
This also meant that we had to design for these types of user roles to be able to view a mapping of multiple users per each dependent task, as they collaborated with counterparts of several categories within a given flow and had multiple points of contact.
This allowed our system to work seamlessly for a wide variety of user roles and scenarios.
Translating various workflows into a shared mental model
One of the most transformative new views we created was the Project view, which is the core place where all contributors to a larger workflow can go to understand its real-time progression and health, whether you’re monitoring the work, actively assigned work to complete or review, or just an operational role that wants to know if everything is in good shape.
This is something that just doesn’t exist in the current state of all of these workflows, as they’re generally documented within an excel spreadsheet that says what steps need to be done by when, but doesn’t show any type of real-time context as the workflow is underway.
We were able to review current tracking documents for workflows like Marketing events & planogram creation, and combine that with what we’ve seen and experienced in other areas of Sam’s throughout the years, to create a standardized, digital format that still took different user needs into consideration.
The project view gives all contributors a quick snapshot of the project’s health—including progression and risks based on incomplete and overdue tasks.
Additionally, we implemented controls to manage the different scopes needed for different users—from all assignees and categories to a single category—utilizing the role-based task model to default the view to the individual user’s mapped set of categories based on their login.
This provided the necessary level of personalization while still providing flexibility to user roles who require different scopes at different times, or for cases like PTO coverage between users.
The Project view centers around a comprehensive tracker that takes all of the tasks laid out in the source documents and shows them grouped based on dependencies, so users can understand their connections and impact, and where blockers or bottlenecks are.
This view got a lot of both user and stakeholder excitement in terms of its potential for more seamless workflow coordination, and the product lead of the Fusion ecosystem prioritized beginning development on this view shortly after our program ended.
Detailed concept design delivery
We delivered a concept hand-off for MVP Phase II that included detailed documentation of 7 total views and 14 new features for near-term and longer-term solutions.
This included enhancements to the previously-delivered task dashboard views, along with net new views for Projects, creators, and collaborators, as well as capabilities like dependencies, subtasks, watching and sharing tasks, and approving and rejecting.
System thinking documentation
Task user role definitions and relationships
Scaling the task system to meet the needs of additional teams and processes required us to provide guidance and standards for integration moving forward, as we knew that the system would only be successful for users if it was clear and consistent.
We documented the definitions, associated traits, and relationship between user roles like task creators, assignees, reviewers, and collaborators.
Guiding principles
We also created guiding principles to describe the primary traits of what constitutes a task in this system to prevent teams from bombarding users with tasks for every to-do-list item to be done. A “task” in this system had to be trackable work that abides by a specific deadline, and had to be a single component of work accomplished in one location.
Trackable
Tasks should be work that requires some level of tracking and monitoring between two users. The task system enables shared visibility of the status of a task to make this possible.
Deadline-based
Due dates are the most critical criteria attached to a task, for the assignee to understand when the work needs to be completed. If work doesn’t require a deadline, consider other communication channels.
Single component of work
Tasks should only be a single component of work to be done, in a single location. If a task requires navigating to multiple tools or apps to complete, break the work up into individual tasks per location or source.
Task content guidelines
We broke down the fields attached to a “task” in this system and created guidelines around the do’s and don’t’s for each field, with specific examples.
Creating definition around naming conventions and usage of fields ensured that there would be a consistent approach as new teams and workflows were integrated into the system, so a user wouldn’t spend time having to learn and re-learn how to find and decipher information about a task.
Task flow documentation
As we scaled the use cases in the task system, we created documentation of the integrated workflows that we reviewed and validated with product stakeholders and users to ensure accuracy. These workflows included the tasks in the workflow and their relationships and dependencies between one another, the application sources for each step, and the triggers for moving from one step to the next.
MVP strategy deck
In addition to our design documentation, we delivered a comprehensive 32-slide design strategy and approach deck for a robust knowledge transfer as our team handed off the work, which was crucial to retaining historical knowledge of the program as organizational shifts occurred.
This deck included documentation of where our team left off, summaries of each core view and feature, a breakdown of the MVP strategy—including dependencies, role-based task assignment, adoption, integration, etc.—and even future scope considerations.
