• Brainstorm issues and opportunities with our listings.                                                                                                                                                   
• Explore possible solutions for listing issues
• Vote to determine set of MVP features

We invited the Marketplace Managers, Marketplace Operations Team, Vendor Managers and Listing Quality Team to brainstorm issues and opportunities with marketplace listings inviting all kinds of thoughts sticking to the core theme of product listings using sticky notes and sharpies. The participants were given 10 minutes to brainstorm and write down all their thoughts on the sticky notes.

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Each participant went one by one across the table speaking out one sticky note at a time and placed the note on the board. If it followed a similar theme, other participants also placed their notes near that note and continued to do it till everybody had finished their sticky notes. While participants were placing their notes, I was creating themes and placing the pink sticky notes over the group of yellow sticky notes.

These were the main themes that emerged from this session:

• Content Validation
• Inactive Listings
• Drop Shipment Vendor Focused
• Marketplace Rules and Restrictions
• Marketplace Level Validation
• Reasons for Listing to be Inactive
• Data sent to Marketplaces
• Correct Listings at the Correct Marketplaces
• Feedback from Marketplaces
• Intercommunication between Teams
• Fear of the Unknown
• Outliers
  

After the affinity mapping session, participants were asked to sketch 8 ideas to solve the problems based on the themes that emerged in 8 minutes using an ideation method used in Google Design Sprint called Crazy 8s. They could either sketch 8 ideas or even 1 idea in 8 different ways.

We got 7 main ideas from this session that we could work on to improving our product listings:

1. Popup Window for a specific listing issue
   - User can claim the issue if they are working on it
   - Can add notes to help resolve similar issues in the future
2. Report that can be downloaded that includes
   - Item ID Column
   - Columns for Marketplace
   - Item cost split by marketplace distribution to prioritize issues
   - All known item errors
3. Page for each Marketplace with list of all known errors
4. For each item, show listing health on every marketplace
   - Ability to drill into listing issues for each marketplace
5. Page/report to show for all items if they have restrictions
   - CARB Compliance
   - Prop 65
   - Chemicals
   - Batteries
6. High visibility dashboard/snapshot to show what's happening with your catalog or marketplace
   - Ability to click into and get more details
7. Marketplace columns in Inventory Spreadsheet
   - Show if listed or not
   - Show if Buy Box repressed
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After the 8 minutes of sketching, each participant went one by one presenting their ideas using sketches and then were given five sticky dots to vote on the sketch of the idea they liked the most (they could even vote on their own idea).

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After getting all the themes for issues related to product-listings and multiple ideas to resolve it, I along with my Product Manager used Trello and Figma to storyboard all the themes and ideas into a product flow that could help us transform our data into wireframes for a cohesive product that encompasses all the ideas and issues.

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Following the storyboard, I created some wireframe screens using Figma that followed the flow of the storyboard to have follow-up conversations with stakeholders like PMs, Listing Quality Team and Engineering regarding the product feasibility and possible functionality add-ons.

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After showing the wireframes to stakeholders, there were a couple of minor requests like adding more filters like Error Type and First Reported Date and removing the priority column since it was not clear what the criteria should be. I then created a clickable hi-fidelity prototypes using our Meta 3 Design System components on Figma and incorporated the stakeholder feedback making them usability test ready with the end-users.

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We selected 6 end-users for this test where they were asked to complete 2 tasks using the clickable prototype on figma while they are being observed by me and project manager, to see where they encounter problems, experience confusion and get useful feedback.

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We got a lot of useful feedback during the 6 usability testing sessions and then our team did a whiteboarding session to decide on the features that are a need to have vs nice to have and decided on these :

• Add Inventory Value (FIFO) column to help prioritize
• Add Live Status to indicate if listing is down or not
• Add Inventory Quantity (QoH) column to help prioritize
• Explore using labels to make error names more user-friendly
• Explore building a higher-level overview page to quickly show stats about health marketplace
• Add ability to search for an item and quickly see if it has errors
• In the Item Details Pane, adding the following information
  - CrossLister and Content Creator links
  - Other Errors
  - Last Successful Update
  - When the error message came

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After the whiteboarding session and deciding on the features that need to be added to the product, we did another round of testing with a smaller group of end-users using the updated prototypes before starting the development of the product.

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After this session we got only three changes that would address the feedback/concern regarding the current prototype of the product. Here are the key changes required:

• Replace Title column with Part Number (PN) column
• Replace Live Status with Toggled On/Off
• Change title of Inventory Qty column to Sellable Qty
  

We launched the beta version of this product to 8 users only and wanted to get more feedback before we launch the product for everyone. We included a feedback popup and was demoed in our all company meeting.

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