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Shipt CMS is the internal product merchandising, media, and marketing use to build what customers see on web. I was brought on to improve the tool itself: user experience, intake from teams, and a roadmap with my PM that moves the product toward self-service.
Digital merchandising and media build what customers see on web; marketing is secondary (landing pages, segments).
That means global and retailer homepages, deals, product collections, and more. Almost every homepage initiative runs through the CMS, so when leadership or partners want a big change, the tool sits in the dependency chain and cross-team collaboration starts here.
When merch and media cannot self-serve in the CMS, engineering becomes the bottleneck for what customers see on the homepage.
Success is self-service: users find how to do their work in the product, not in Slack.
Build a feature that is tech heavy and expect there will be a flood of messages from merch and marketing asking how it works. Blame the users for not being technical enough.
Design for clarity up front so engineering was not the default support, including for features that already existed but were not discoverable in the product.
Quarterly survey NPS over two quarters. Goal was 9 out of 10 within four quarters through enhancements and net-new work. Open-ended feedback shifted from feature requests to positive comments.
My PM and I estimated engineering support at roughly $700 per page when the tool was not self-serve. Not remeasured post-launch, but it framed why self-service mattered.
I design the tool, not the campaigns.
That includes UX inside the CMS plus intake from users and other teams, cross-functional requirements, and shaping what we ship each quarter with my PM. Each quarter balanced two tracks: industry parity (net-new features) and tool enhancements (improving what was already built), alongside intake from homepage dependencies. We ran competitive research (industry tools and our parent company CMS), defined five parity features, and prioritized by most pain solved at once. I partnered with six engineers to ship while still handling intake.
Five net-new features for industry parity (dashboard shipped first):
Shipped work below maps to those two tracks: one parity new feature we led with, then tool enhancements on existing surfaces (not the full parity roadmap).
Everyone landed on one shared list that favored marketing alphabetically, so you kept searching for your own work after every context switch.
The dashboard made content discoverable by owner, set up approvals later, and scoped loads to what each user needs so eng was not loading everyone's work during a search.
Future and expired schedules were already in the data, but the placement table showed empty cells until you knew where to click.
We surfaced expired and future content, moved table to cards, and showed references so teams could plan a high-value homepage slot without Slack or eng.
Users confused mobile web preview with the native app, so we labeled both clearly and added retailer and zip filters so preview matched how content actually served.