LiveAuctioneers is an online auction marketplace. Every day, the operations team reports issues to the product team, and as the company grew, these reports became more frequent.
The PM was concerned that we wouldn’t be able to keep up with the volume of requests in the near future.
We decided to do an audit of the team’s workflows to identify areas for improvement.
I interviewed members from different departments to learn about their day-to-day tasks and pain points. I then created a chart that clearly mapped out how our work intersects with sellers, buyers, and shipping partners.
I reviewed 300+ messages in the operations Slack channels (didn't take too long) to understand the types of tasks the team handles. This helped me create a quantified analysis of their workload so we can use these numbers to measure success.
I hosted a meeting with key team members to share my findings. Together, we prioritized the issues and discussed potential solutions.
Sometimes the algorithm makes mistakes. Currently, the product doesn't have the function to know which quotes are likely inaccurate. Even when we know, the team had to use different tools and go to pages to verify the quote. Inaccurate quotes directly affect sales.
The same issue applies to order tracking—currently, there's no quick way to identify orders that have been stuck in transit longer than expected.
If we create some rules, engineers can trigger alerts accordingly. But where should we send the alert? After the discussion, we agreed that a dedicated page for auction and order status would work better than using Slack or email notifications.
⭐️ It only takes 2 steps for the team to check the quotes with this tool.
⭐️ We created separate tables for "Upcoming" and "Ended" auctions, since the teams handle very different tasks at each stage.
⭐️ The "Alerts" section works like a filter—clicking an alert refreshes the table to show relevant entries.
After a few iterations, team members were excited about the new dashboard. They felt it would greatly improve their efficiency.
Since we can’t run an A/B test to get accurate data for this project, we’ll continue checking in with the operations team to see whether the dashboard has improved their speed and accuracy.
This tool helps the team quickly check whether the algorithm has correctly fetched item dimensions, which is crucial for accurate shipping quotes.
This tool allows the team to set up complex commission rules based on ticket types, timeframes, payment methods, and more.
