Category Manager Dashboard
A calm, opinionated cockpit for category managers — surfacing the next best action across 12K SKUs.
The brief.
12,000 SKUs across nine categories. Managers were drowning in tabs. We built a dashboard that prioritises what's broken first and quietly stays out of the way when things are fine.
The previous tool treated every metric equally — a wall of charts that took thirty minutes to read. Managers needed a surface that triaged itself: what changed today, what's at risk this week, what's safe to ignore.
Talking to real users.
- ✦Card sorting
- ✦First-click testing
- ✦Task-based interviews
- ✦Eye-tracking pilot
9 category managers · 4 buyers · 2 supply-chain leads
5 weeks discovery + biweekly co-design
"I open ten tabs before I've had coffee. I want one."
"I don't know which metric matters — I stare at all of them."
- Insight 01
Triage over transparency
Managers didn't want more data — they wanted a shorter list of what needs attention.
- Insight 02
Glance density matters
Above-the-fold had to encode 12 signals without feeling like a cockpit.
- Insight 03
Deltas beat absolutes
'Change since yesterday' was the most-scanned value in every test.
How it came together.
- 01
Wrote an information-priority matrix with the head of category before any pixels.
- 02
Designed in two registers — 'glance' (status, deltas) and 'focus' (the one chart you came for).
- 03
Built a custom data-viz kit on top of an existing tokens layer, no third-party charts.
- 04
Iterated on density with real managers, not stakeholders — six rounds before launch.
Inside the work.
