Suganth Chellamuthu — Product Designer

The Problem with Running Promotions on Spreadsheets

Buyers at a major UK supermarket ran their entire promotional nominations process through spreadsheets — data across multiple files, shared via email, reconciled manually, with compliance checked after the fact. Errors crept in at every handoff. The brief: design a product that let buyers create compliant nominations in one place, from first idea to submission.

The Design North Star

I embedded with buyers, observing real promotional nominations alongside stakeholder sessions with category managers, finance, and compliance. One insight shaped everything that followed:

"From the analysis, it was very clear that the buyers are motivated by seeing the promotions they had created in the stores."

— Research synthesis, Analysis & Insights stage

The product wasn't just a compliance tool. It was the instrument through which buyers exercised professional judgement. Designing for that sense of ownership shaped every decision.

Three Research Findings That Shaped the Design

Financial data belongs upfront, not at the end

Buyers were making product and pricing decisions without access to margin data — then discovering financial problems at the review stage. The insight from co-creation was unambiguous: giving buyers access to margin and sales data at the point of product selection saved significant time and produced better-calibrated promotions.

Compliance had to be embedded, not bolted on

The spreadsheet process treated compliance as a gate at the end — an external review that could reject work already done. Buyers found this demoralising and inefficient. The product needed to surface compliance requirements within the workflow, preventing non-compliant nominations from being built in the first place.

Buyers needed to see the aggregate, not just the line

Promotions don't exist in isolation. A buyer managing multiple events across a season needed to see the aggregate financial impact — total forecast across the portfolio — not just the individual promotion's numbers. Without that view, financially conflicting promotions were being submitted simultaneously.

Designing the Five-Step Nomination Workflow

I designed the core interaction model as a structured five-step promotion creation flow, surfaced within a dashboard that gave buyers a live view of all their active events and promotions. Every step was designed to prevent errors before they happened — not flag them after submission.

Select Products

Search and add products to the promotion. Retail price, promotional price, discount percentage, and live margin data displayed at product level — giving buyers immediate financial context for every selection.

Offer Details

Define the promotion mechanics — promotional period, themed event alignment (Barbeque weekends, Healthy Living, Summer Special), and offer structure. Compliance requirements surface here, not at review.

Location

Choose which stores the promotion runs in — full estate, Express format, regional selection (e.g. Scotland), or custom zone. Decisions visible at this step affect forecast calculations in real time.

Forecast

Live aggregate financial forecast — broken down by week, with total revenue, volume, and margin projections across the full promotional period. Buyers see the financial impact of their choices before committing.

Submit

Review nomination, validate all details, and submit for approval. Draft status tracking and error flagging ensure nothing is submitted incomplete or non-compliant.

The Key Design Discovery

Buyers were embedded as co-designers throughout — not as occasional feedback sessions, but from concept sketches to interactive prototypes. The most significant finding: when buyers were shown live margin and sales data at the product selection step, their behaviour changed fundamentally. They stopped selecting on habit and started calibrating against financial reality from the start. Promotions became tighter. Rework at review dropped.

"Giving access to margin and sales data upfront saved them a lot of time. They were also able to tune the promotions better."

— Co-creation process finding

Buyers More Efficient. The Organisation Leaner. Shoppers Better Off.

The product delivered outcomes at three levels simultaneously — a rarity in enterprise software where gains at the organisational level often come at the cost of the end user, or vice versa.

Buyer efficiency

The structured workflow and in-context financial data eliminated the back-and-forth between spreadsheets, finance teams, and compliance reviewers. Buyers could create, forecast, and submit a promotion without leaving the tool — and the promotional nominations that came out were more accurate and better calibrated from the start.

Organisational savings

Standardising the nomination process meant fewer errors reaching the review stage, less rework, and better financial alignment across the promotional calendar. The organisation saved meaningful money by catching margin conflicts and compliance issues before submission rather than after.

Better value for shoppers