My assignment - Visualization

1. Challenge: Describe your challenge, including all relevant information.

In my work, my manager asked me to optimize the product offers. We have nearly 200 products  in our product portfolio. I asked a question to myself “what to optimize?”. A total of 200 products is  much bigger and it takes a lot of time to figure out what is unnecessary on each product and kill  the products from the portfolio. My biggest fear is that in any case I should not remove or kill any  profit-making product from portfolio. Because, if I do any changes, it will affect the related  products, the customers, and the overall company brand. My main challenge is to optimize in a  way that does not affect any product qualities and cause any negative result.

2. Selection: In your own words, briefly describe the tool you selected (e.g., what it is and why you

selected it for your challenge -- including any appropriate video lecture references).

To my problem, I decided to use Visualization. Visualization can be a very powerful tool to  organize the information of the products and help us to understand the problem better and also  finding the solution quicker. Visualization helps to understand how different elements are  interrelated with each other. It is also a good way to grasp the core idea at one glimpse since we  process images quicker and on a more real problem level than mere words. if visual tools really  do the same kind of magic trick, but I am more than willing to give it a try

3. Application: Describe how you applied the tool you selected to your challenge (e.g., what you did

and how the tool was applied effectively or ineffectively).

I started to list out the 200 products in an excel. The excel also contains the sales details for the  past five years. To begin the investing into each product, I listed the products with least sales in  the last five years in increasing order. The list shows the product list that generates the low value  to the company. Here, we cannot simply choose and remove the product from portfolio because  these products are linked or acts as supporting product to the high selling products. If I remove  these products, Customer who buys high products will stop buying it and we lose the customer.  So, I picked up top 20 low performing products and developed a mapping in a sheet. I mapped all  the products with their corresponding high selling product and listed out the products that are low  selling yet no relation with high selling products. Here, visualization and mapping used to figure  the products that are low valuable and does not affect our customers. I can be able to list out the  product and offer a clear solution to my manager.

4. Insight: Describe the insight you gained from applying the tool you selected to your challenge

(e.g., how an insight affected your thinking about the challenge and about design thinking more  broadly).

Here, by using the tool, I can be able to figure out solutions so quickly and more reliable. The  visualization gave me an idea to think clearly and create a best solution. By using visual  elements, visualization tools provide an accessible way to see and understand trends, outliers,  and patterns in data. Decision making increasingly relies on data, which comes at us with a clear  picture of visualization. Decision machining become easier when I visualize the data.

5. Approach: Describe what you might do differently next time -- applying the same tool you

selected or a different one -- and the reason(s) why.

Visualization is very useful for me to understand the situation and to make decision faster. So  next time, I start using the visualization and learning launch tool to one our future products  release. Here, visualization will help me to understand the problem of customer and learning  launch tool will help me to understand what customer really feels about our product on using our  MVP(Minimum viable product) product in application field testing.

