GoPro: Optimize Workflow for Karma Relaunch
OPPORTUNITY
GoPro relaunched it's first drone, Karma, in early 2017. The first launch surfaced product issues, leading to a full recall.
The relaunch required all teams to forecast the quantity of drones needed for marketing purposes. An integral part of success was getting the updated product to key people: events team to bring to trade shows, training team to educate retail partners on updates, PR team to send to top influencers.
Our current workflow to forecast amount of products needed had glaring issues that slowed down the process and shortages in supply.
MY ROLE
I led the effort to streamline the product forecasting workflow; working cross-functionally across four departments. Activities began from user testing through implementation.
Understanding user pain points
USER INTERVIEWS
I spoke to all the teams involved in the product forecasting process: Demand Planning, 12 marketing teams, Marketing Operations, and Finance. I gathered all of their pain points and mapped out where they occurred in the overall process.
The gray in the work flow below highlights the problem areas:
- Lack of data-driven guidance for forecasting their product needs for the campaign launch
- Duplicative steps that led to wasted time
- Lack of clear documentation that led to inconsistencies in process
Updating the Workflow
To address the teams' pain points above, I proposed and implemented the following changes:
- Pulled historical product forecasting data to guide teams on future campaign needs
- Moved steps that had higher chances of key blockers occurring to earlier in the process so issues could be resolved before deadline
- Created a single shared document across all teams for a single place of truth
Impact
By consolidating inefficient steps, we were able to decrease the turn around time for product forecasting process from 3 weeks to 1.5 weeks.
By providing historical forecasting data, we were able to forecast more accurately for future campaigns, leading to a decrease in surplus and unmet product needs.
