Tulip
World’s largest retail customer engagement platform
I came across Tulip when I was looking for sponsors for Women and Color's speaker bootcamp. Since I had some ecommerce experience with Harbour Goods Co., I was curious to learn more about what problems Raine Qian was looking to solve by hiring someone on the design team.
It came down to three problems:
- Tulip had built a number of products over the years which led to the product suite lacking a consistent design language
- The design team mostly consisted of junior designers who needed more support and coaching
- Some of the senior developers were “iOS maximalists” and could be hostile towards the design team if they didn't propose designs exactly as outlined in Apple’s HIG
Since I already had some experience unifying a suite of products from my time at KEV Group as well as building the foundation of a design system from my time at CIBC Live Labs, I figured this could be a good opportunity to hone my skills further. Plus, since I already had experience building iOS apps at Format and working on GrapeTrail, I felt comfortable with my ability to create designs per Apple's HIG.
Senior Product Designer
Apr 2018–Nov 2018
I was tasked to work on Clienteling—Tulip's core product. One of my first tasks was to figure out how we can visually show different product categories (e.g. men's, women's, tops, bottoms, etc.) that a brand organizes their products by on the home screen while ensuring that the screen adjusts based on the number of product categories and device orientation. I didn't find this to be a difficult issue to solve from a design standpoint. However, I needed to "sell" my solution to the dev team who generally didn't like new design ideas if it didn't mimic something Apple has already done within their apps.
As I started working on more designs, I found myself getting frustrated with the lack of a design system, let alone a component library. I would have to search through various design files to find the components someone previously had designed. Even then, it wouldn't always be up-to-date or designed for use of different devices (e.g. iPhone vs iPad). So I advocated to build the foundation of a design system that we can all use and contribute to. We'd be able to design faster and ensure all of our designs are consistent.
UX Lead and Senior Product Manager
Dec 2018–Mar 2019
With new members joining the design team and some product managers leaving Tulip, I had the opportunity to take on a split role once again.
As the UX Lead, I continued to support our design team and helped them contribute to our nascent design system. Since each of the designers were working on a different product line, it was important to ensure they were using components from the design system while also ensuring they had room to create and contribute new components, as needed.
For the Senior Product Manager role, I was assigned to Chanel—Tulip's second largest client at the moment. Chanel's use case was a bit more complex from other clients since they wanted to use Tulip's technology in-stores while also incorporating some of its functionality in their existing mobile app that would also need to integrate with the website. To add to this complexity, this implementation would need stakeholder input from Chanel's New York office as well as the Paris head office.
