Summary

 

Recommendation

Large retailers benefit from a dedicated team owning the product find journey. This team should be an interface between day-to-day trading tasks and requirements and technical implementations.

Typical skills contain

• Analytical and strategic thinking
• Understanding of IT and business requirements and language
• Knowledge of analytics and optimisation tools
• Shopper-centric view

Smaller retailers need to find replicate these skills in existing teams.

Possible team structures

Fit into existing structure

Benefits

• Less complex organisation
• Better suited for smaller organisations
• Better suited for organisations with highly technically/analytically skilled merchandisers

Challenges

• Individual users may have too many responsibilities preventing them from fully utilising Attraqt and growing into Attraqt experts
• Structured ranking/search optimisation is rare. Managers are responsible for many aspects of trading simultaneously, which limits their ability to also take ownership of search/ranking optimisation projects.
• Team members often the experience or technical/analytical skills necessary to take full ownership of more complex settings. Optimisation projects tend to get outsourced.

Factors for success

• Analytical skills and project management experience in the trading team
• Encourage trading managers to become SMEs and take ownership for different aspects of the Fredhopper platform.
• Document how-to and best practice internally, taking internal processes and customisation into account

Dedicated Merchandising Strategy Team

Benefits

• Team members are dedicated to improving product find experience
• Team members can build Attraqt expertise more quickly and in much more detail
• Creates natural interface between retailer and Attraqt, which improves turn-around time by channelling questions to known point of contact
• Fewer duplicate questions and better internal knowledge sharing due to channelling of questions

Challenges

• Not suitable for small organisations
• Highly reliant on excellent people in the optimisation team. Requires some level of redundancy to not create a single point of failure
• Merchandising optimisation team rely on trading and IT teams for support without direct authority

Factors for success

• Optimisation team with excellent analytical skills, cross-functional expertise (trading and IT) and self starter mentality
• Close relationship between optimisation team and trading and product management to get the required support

Ownership by Trading or IT only

Benefits

• Clear ownership
• Simplest model

Challenges

• Usually very slow time to market for changes
  • If Attraqt is owned by trading: very slow technical changes (e.g. feature integration, data)
  • If Attraqt is owned by IT: slow merchandising strategy changes or none at all
• Usually poor interaction between business and IT, leading to overlooked requirements or work arounds