Leading Customer-First Product Development & UX at Cult Beauty
E-Commerce | UX Leadership | Product Management2017 - 2022At Cult I operated as both the UX and Product lead as part of the Project Delivery team, owning feature development for all proprietary back-office tools and e-commerce storefront and making significant contributions to Tech and Growth strategy.
As a start-up that quadrupled in size during my tenure, my role was varied and fast-paced. My responsibilities included:
→ Creation and leadership of the UX team, owning all research, testing, accessibility & design QA.
→ Solution designs for all internally developed tools and features in collaboration with departmental Product Owners and C-Suite.
→ Research, accessibility, quality assurance and optimisation testing for all new features.
→ Conduit and de-facto problem-solver between the Senior Management Team and Tech on all user-facing projects.
In addition, as part of the Project Delivery team I designed and proposed an overhaul to the way Tech operated in the business.
Based on my process designs, delivery strategy and a huge team effort from the Project Delivery squad, the business implemented sweeping changes to the way we valued, approved, validated and built all new features and integrations.
This led to huge gains in the speed, efficiency and quality of deliverables with proper value/effort prioritisation, QA testing and success measurements.
Key Deliverables
SAP Platform Migration & Re-Brand
Complete platform migration from 50/50 proprietary software and Magento Enterprise to SAP S4/HANA.
In parallel, the marketing team were working on a total re-brand to coincide with the rollout.
I led gap-requirement identification for all user-facing aspects of the S4/HANA migration as well as data architecture migration analysis and optimisation recommendations.
In addition, I provided training and identification of strategic opportunities to Cult Beauty business users using S4/HANA tools all whilst directing the UX team and external SAP Success Team in translating the new brand guidelines to the SAP Commerce storefront.
Product Inventory Manager, Scheduler & Promotions Engine
In collaboration with our Front End Lead we embarked on discovery with business users across the company.
Together we presented solution designs to the SMT that not only addressed the limitations our Merchandising and Marketing teams were facing but also empowered them to change their ways of working altogether.
Through an intensive schedule of workshops and drop-in sessions with business users from merchandising, marketing, content and design we defined detailed requirements, scrutinised process flows for setting up new products and retiring old ones, and rebuilt our product and category information architecture from scratch.
Utilising the design system created as part of the previous OMS project we were able to rapidly bring multiple prototyped products to live user testing:
→ Product Inventory & Content Manager
→ Product Launch & Lifecycle Scheduler
→ Promotion Rules Engine
Offering vastly improved flexibility, contributor access control, built-in approval process, and driving multiple new storefront features these tools had far-reaching positive impacts, changing the way the marketing and merchandising teams operated.
Customer Service & Order Management Suite
After establishing the UX team at Cult Beauty I took over product management of an in-flight collection of proprietary Customer Service/Order Management workflows.
I embedded directly in the engineering squad mid-development and set about transforming the assortment of tables and text links into professional, user-tested and approved OMS workflows.
We assigned a dedicated Product Owner in the Customer Service team who aided the Business Analysts and I in facilitating our discovery workshops and gathering feedback on information architecture and user flows so we could rapidly iterate, validate our ideas and keep moving the project forward.
This led to >200% improvement in customer service tickets successfully closed per week demonstrating significant efficiency improvements in handling customer enquiries and order issues - as well as overwhelming gratitude from our CS team (and customers)!
Internationalisation
Cult Beauty operated on a .co.uk domain solely in £GBP inclusive of VAT, yet 40% of revenue came from international customers.
Customer research demonstrated a strong desire from international customers to shop the unique selection of brands Cult Beauty carried.
I worked with an external consultant, our lead BA and CTO to present two solutions:
A quick and easy, but costly and inflexible, 3rd party integration.
A proprietary upgrade to our recently deployed PIM and OMS systems leveraging the flexibility we had built into those products.
After many iterations, our solution designs, roadmap and accompanying user flows for a proprietary collection of features and updates to our existing backend platform were approved.
The internationalisation project added region-specific store configurations and currencies leading to a ~25% uplift in international revenue in the 12 months after rollout.
Conversion Rate Optimisation Roadmap
Alongside major projects, I worked with our Test Lead to maintain a steady flow of conversion optimisations through the UX team across the homepage, category pages, product pages, search, basket, checkout and more.
We coordinated enhancements with the front-end team to ensure changes required no more than 1 day of Engineering effort and slotted these tickets into our ‘BAU’ sprint rota typically used for bug fixes. This ensured dnegligible impact to engineering resource on major projects and no conflicts over prioritisation.
On average this roadmap added +2-5% revenue per year over the 3 years we ran it, with specific successes of up to 10% lift to the conversion rate on the mobile basket, product pages and homepage.
MatchMe Foundation Finder
A mobile-based tool to address the challenge of selecting the right foundation shade online developed in partnership with a US-based AI facial recognition company.
Assigned as the de facto Product Manager by our CTO, I collaborated with a crack team of internal stakeholders and experts in foundation shade-matching to redefine consumer expectations of a digital foundation recommendation tool.
Through many rounds of live user testing, focus sessions, a stringent roadmap, and strict product quality assurance, we launched the mobile web app, which led to a ~15% increase in foundation sales over the following two quarters and proved to be a critical tool in distance selling of foundation products once COVID lockdown hit in the third quarter after launch.
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