Flatiron School project · Constellation Brands
Designed a mobile app to make it easier for employees to discover, track, and share information about 100+ brands.
Problem statement
Employees loved the brands but couldn’t find product information in the existing CRM: search meant digging through vendor and store records, and stipend tracking was confusing.
A focused MVP of Search & Filter, Event Shaker and My Shelf, refined through user testing
Product-first search instead of store-by-store hunting
A research-backed backlog, including a stipend tracker for later
User research
Interviews with employees across Constellation Brands departments surfaced four consistent pain points with the existing Compass CRM.
“The more we learn about the total company portfolio, the more we’re able to raise a glass and raise our sales.”
Synthesis
Affinity mapping, journey mapping and Rose, Thorn, Bud turned interviews into three themes that set feature priorities. Abigail’s journey, a Community Affairs Manager discovering a new product, showed where the existing app broke down.
Design decisions
What I did. Designed structured search and filtering across the full portfolio by category and content type, so employees could go straight to a product.
Why it mattered. Finding: employees had to dig through vendor or store records. As one put it, “I have to search, and I have to click on each store to see if the store carries it.”
What I did. Designed My Shelf, where employees collect favorite products and share them with their networks.
Why it mattered. Finding: “There should be an easy way to create a record of which wine I like, so I can easily share it with friends.”
What I did. Designed Event Shaker: shake the phone to randomize and locate nearby accounts on a map.
Why it mattered. Stakeholder and SME interviews pointed to a more social platform where employees act as brand ambassadors, and “Sociable” became one of our four design principles.
What I did. The stipend finding led to an Allowance Tracker. It tested with interest, and I designed a high-fidelity version, but the team excluded it from the MVP because it drifted from our core problem statement.
Why it mattered. In hindsight, my view is that we sidelined it too quickly; a smaller exploration of how employees manage their allowance could have been worth it.
Design evolution
Early feature directions, wireframed and tested
Reflection
Ambassador reminded me not to confuse an interesting feature with the most important problem to solve. Some of our early ideas tested well, but the research kept bringing us back to a more fundamental need: helping employees understand and navigate a huge portfolio of brands. I’d still explore some of the ideas we set aside, but only after validating that they support that core need.