Product management streamlining e-commerce retail insights

The challenge

The retailer’s reporting system lacked governance and documentation for 3000 database structures supporting 300 weekly reports. This deficiency in oversight made it increasingly difficult to manage the growing demands of the business. Several obstacles hindered their progress: 

• Manual tasks by domain specialists took up a lot of time.
• Staff shortages further strained resources.
• Fragmented reports led to low-quality data.

Forced changes in data sources driven by organisational development made the reporting process worse. The created chaos began affecting the overall customer experience, inducing the retailer to seek a solution. That was the time our client approached VirtusLab for assistance.

The solution

VirtusLab appointed a product manager (PM) to streamline reporting capabilities and oversee the client’s development team. The PM played a crucial role in identifying key analytical challenges, overseeing project delivery, as well as continually seeking process and technological enhancements to maximize customer value.

Once the PM created a holistic view of all issues, the primary goal was to simplify reporting complexities by identifying essential reports, eliminating redundancies, and initiating immediate improvements before automating repetitive tasks.

The automation involved setting up daily adjusted, shared database structures that made generating reports more efficient, including: 

• Consolidating complex tables
• Enhancing data quality
• Increasing performance across the entire data lake

VirtusLab’s product manager guided the client’s team toward enhanced data transparency by creating comprehensive documentation and metadata repositories. They fostered collaborative teamwork by leveraging Agile methodologies and experimenting with new technologies to identify the best fit. 

The manager also coached developers to engage more openly with business stakeholders through consistent practice and clear task definitions. By instituting a framework for sustainable reporting practices, the manager set the retailer on a path to future growth

The results

VirtusLab's product management efforts significantly decreased the number of reports sent via email while addressing new reporting needs for streamlined business initiatives:

1. Enhanced reporting capabilities
2. Consolidated similar reports and stopped the creation of unnecessary reports
3. Reduced data platform structures by 30%, leaving only essential structures
4. Automated several reports
5. Improved data quality
6. Increased stakeholder engagement and customer satisfaction