Operations & Service Design · 2024 to 2025
Bringing stock and fulfilment data into one clear view.
Untangling shared stock pools into one consistent view, across the Warehouse Management System and Campaign Manager reporting.
Role
Senior Product Designer
Worked with
Product, Commercial, Engineering, Fulfilment
Focus
Shared stock across brands and campaigns
Outcome
Real-time stock and SLA visibility
Setting the Scene
This one started somewhere unglamorous, and it wasn’t on anyone’s roadmap. I could see what the spreadsheets and email chains between SoPost and its fulfilment partners were costing us, so I put the case for a Warehouse Management System to our CFO, our CTO and my manager, and got the go-ahead. The three of us built it in 2024: our CFO, who knew the operation inside out, Katie in Fulfilment Operations, who worked with the warehouses day to day, and me. The WMS replaced all of that with one role-based system. Building it turned up something I wasn’t expecting, real discrepancies in the data behind stock and fulfilment.
I then audited Mission Control and Campaign Manager, and the message became even clearer: the numbers didn’t match across systems, and there was no single, central reporting hub. That audit became the Reporting Area Redesign.
The stock work came next, and it was a big piece of work in its own right. The aim was a unified view of stock and fulfilment health that worked across both the WMS and Campaign Manager reporting.
The Work
Stock and Fulfilment Visualisation
Problem
While the WMS improved operational tracking, Campaign Manager still lacked a clear, consistent view of stock health. There was a fulfilment dashboard already, but it was one page of figures set as text, with a pie chart. It told you what the numbers were, not whether anything needed doing.
Stock was also split into partitions: separate amounts set aside for a particular campaign, brand or product. How those splits were set up varied from brand to brand, so it was hard to see which products, activities or fulfilment tasks were drawing on the same stock.
Design Approach
I collaborated with Product, Commercial and Engineering to define how stock data flowed between systems and how it should be presented. The goal was visual consistency and fast diagnosis of fulfilment status across both the WMS and Campaign Manager reporting.
Exploration
- Worked through the fulfilment flow diagrams to see what depended on what, who depended on it, and what was responsible for what
- Created dashboard sketches and interactive prototypes
- Tested different ways of grouping stock, by product, by activity and by partition, looking for one that made sense however a campaign had been set up
- Tried nested and shared views, so you could see at a glance when several products or markets were drawing on the same stock
- Worked on colour, hierarchy and wording until bundles, single products and regional stock read as clearly different things
- Designed dashboards for delivery times and dispatch status, so delays and anything needing attention surfaced on their own
Outcome
The final designs introduced:
- One set of filters, by product, activity and partition
- Clear indicators showing used versus total stock
- Clear signposting wherever stock was shared, so nobody counted it twice
- Visible states for low stock or a missed delivery window
- Overview cards for how exports and dispatches were performing, flagging anything that needed action
Status
Katie tested the designs with her counterpart at our biggest warehouse, and they rolled out in phases. They informed the next phase of Campaign Manager reporting, and the same clarity and hierarchy carried into the brand-facing dashboards designed for it. The same stock visibility also led into a scalable notification system, first released in 2025, so teams are alerted when stock runs low instead of checking balances by hand. A Customer Success Manager later said that was the part media agencies felt most: they stopped having to ask her, or check the dashboard, to know when to turn ads off.
Reflection
Stock and fulfilment used to be a spreadsheet-shaped process that only a handful of people could see into. Katie told us early on that it was working: hours of manual updating gone, and very little chance of a mistyped number reaching a brand before anyone caught it.
The WMS gave partners and internal teams the same view of what was happening. The stock and fulfilment work carried that into reporting. Between them, campaigns went out with fewer surprises, and it was the first time I had designed across systems rather than one screen at a time.
It also fed directly into the notification system that came next, which took the same idea further: if the system can already see a problem coming, it should say so, rather than waiting for someone to go and look.
“It was a pleasure to work with Jade on the creation of the internal warehouse management system. She took the time to sit down with me and go through every aspect of what I would need the system to be able to do, to ensure she understood exactly how she could help. During the creating process she regularly checked in with me, showing what she had accomplished so far and asking for user feedback. The end product turned out to be everything I needed it to be and more, really reducing the stress of a complicated role.”
Let’s improve something together.
Open to part-time roles and fractional contracts, two to three days a week.