The product

Guided Buying(GB) guides employees through the buying process

Guided Buying(GB) is a professional procurement platform for employees to buy materials and services and provides users guidance with policies and compliance through the experience.

GB's users include both professional and casual buyers. Professional buyers frequently buy for the company. Causal buyers buy occasionally.

The feature

Contribute to the same requisitions together with your team

Team Buying is a collaborative feature that allows multiple users to work on the same requisition. Now, buyers can create a team of experts in different fields and assign roles to each team member, and everyone will have access and pool their knowledge to the same requisitions.

My role

As the sole designer, I designed the end-to-end experience from creation and management to buying and receiving. I collaborated with the researcher to define questions and analyze findings, PMs on project scope and requirements, visual designer to create new components, and engineers to tackle technical challenges.

The impact

This feature introduced the first "team" feature into GB, which reduces the redundancies and workarounds, and boosts efficiency, and adds transparency to the requisition process. For the feature itself, Team Buying minimizes the cost of customers hiring experts to only focus on requisitions for the teams and makes it available to any employees with specific access. At the same time, the feature can rollout to be a future team concept framework, being built into chat, procurement workspace, on behalf of, delegation, etc. And this is only the first step.

The challenge

Firstly, understanding pain points without direct access to end-users is always the hardest for 2B products. Secondly, technical dependencies are a unique challenge for GB. The limitations of P2P and Sourcing engines restrict what GB could achieve and build. However, we maximized and grew this feature with the best we could as a team. We hosted CEI workshops, conducted surveys, etc., trying to understand the real problems. And at the same time, we made many innovative changes that could potentially influence the future roadmap.

To see the full project, please contact me for the password :)