TradeGecko for Manufacturing

TradeGecko is an Inventory and Sales Order Management Software (SaaS) for small to medium retail and wholesale product-based businesses selling across multiple sales channels both online and offline. The customers we served were largely based in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States of America.

Product-based businesses either procure the goods they sell from a supplier, and some produce their own. TradeGecko has fully supported the former, but has a gap on the latter, and we have seen that the lack of support for Manufacturing has become the largest lead disqualification reason (24%) for customers who want to use our product.

As the central hub of their day-to-day operations, connecting and automating all elements of our customers’ inventory is at its core. TradeGecko for Manufacturing allows product-based businesses who assemble and manufacture goods to gain control over their total inventory, orders and supply chain ecosystem from the point of producing their products all the way through to fulfilling orders.

I was Lead Product Designer for the TradeGecko platform’s Manufacturing module, which I took from zero to one as a triad lead alongside a Product Manager and a Technical Lead, driving a team of engineers.

Manufacturing was a brand new domain to any team member in TradeGecko since we’ve only historically been supporting the automation of inventory management for businesses that procure goods from suppliers. I partnered with my Product Manager and crafted a broad research plan, visited warehouses in Singapore, and conducted interviews over video calls with existing customers that produce their own goods in-house.

After sharing our findings with the team and getting a sense of a potential minimum viable product, I conducted a wireframing session across functions in TradeGecko, including members from design, product management, engineering, and customer-facing teams, to ideate early on the shape and form of the functionality while also taking into consideration multiple perspectives from team members with different areas of specialisation. Taking this approach means we get to catch gotchas earlier (e. g. technical feasibility) and allow our engineers to start spiking on the architecture and implementation without having to wait on designs to be finalised.

Considering the ideas I’ve gathered from the sessions, I created wireframes to start gathering early feedback from the customers we’ve spoken to during our user research.

A snapshot from early wireframes presented to customers to validate our workflow designs, showing the Bill of Materials creation flow

To further challenge the high-level ideas I had so far, I did an analysis of existing tools in the eCommerce operations landscape that are already trying to solve a similar problem. While we are enabling the functionality in the TradeGecko app to reduce the number of tools our customers have to manage, with my product manager’s analysis focusing on comparisons around features, I needed to make sure that we are not re-inventing any existing workflow and experience patterns, and at the same time, that we are aware of opportunities where we can be better.

As we form a better sense of our customers’ needs from the ongoing research thus far, I then started creating designs in higher fidelity in parallel, and stitched core workflows together into usable prototypes that we could have customers click on like a real product themselves. In partnership with my Product Manager, we tweak our research plan to start focusing more on the usability of the end-to-end workflow design in the context of using it within the TradeGecko product following its design patterns.

I then start working closely with our Technical Lead as we gain more confidence and get closer to a finalised shape and form of an initial version of the product to allow engineers to spike the technical work in preparation for breaking down our tasks and estimating the work in more detail.

Sample screen - Create a Bill of Materials UI

Sample screen - Completed Production Order UI

With more confidence on the final shape and form of our MVP, we start breaking down our tasks and estimate the work in more detail. In the task breakdown and estimation exercises, I guided the engineers on questions pertaining to implementation to allow them to estimate the work with more confidence.

Once we’ve taken the total estimation of the work, the triad leads (Product Manager Lead, Technical Lead, and myself) then recalibrated the sequencing of our releases from MVP, to MLP, and beyond, identifying what is table stakes and what can be considered as fast-follows. My role in this exercise focuses on ensuring that we are not shipping a bad user experience regardless of how we stagger the scope of each release.

I worked side-by-side with frontend engineers on a day-to-day basis to ensure the UI and UX is up-to-spec, and to unblock them on any issues we encounter along the way during implementation.

I wrote the bug bash instructions broken down into individual testable workflows for teams across functions to test our new feature end-to-end. From this exercise, bugs were filed on JIRA to define our launch ready-ness until all critical issues were resolved prior to our Beta release.

I partnered with my Product Manager in continuing our testing and research as we release a fully working product to a handful of customers in Beta. Working with our team of engineers, I summarised our findings and helped ensure critical issues that came out of the feedback received at this stage were addressed to help identify our full rollout ready-ness, as well as recalibrate our post-release roadmap and sequencing.

I worked with our Knowledge Experts in creating help articles for our knowledge center, providing guidance and visual assets. I also helped create a feature onboarding material for our customer facing teams.

Design and Prototyping

User Research

Project Management