Connect: a decision tool for consumer businesses

Connect was a business decision tool built to help consumer businesses understand how their customers behave, so they could make customer-centric decisions that grow customer value.

I led a lean team on it, a UX researcher, two product managers, and engineering, building the product in a space with no clear playbook to follow.

The challenges

CPG businesses we spoke to were consistently held back by the same handful of problems:

• Long development time and high cost from innovation to product listing
• No consistent, validated source for research and measurement
• Limited agility to respond to consumer opportunities compared to larger competitors
• SKUs launched from other markets missing local consumer needs
• Over 80% of CPG companies failing to meet their target KPIs

What we built

Connect's platform centred on four core tools: a Market Research Tool, a Research Library, an Audience Library, and an Insights Library, each aimed at giving teams a consistent, shared source of truth for understanding their market and customers.

Process

We were working in a relatively unknown space with little to benchmark against, so I introduced tight 6-week iteration cycles: wireframing, validation, UI design, prototyping, testing, and build, looping back into wireframing wherever testing surfaced a problem. That structure let the team test decisions quickly rather than betting on a long build with no reference for whether it would land. Significant time went into testing and iterating on the data visualisation components themselves: how to represent data clearly for a data analyst audience, how colour could be used consistently without conflicting with other systems, and what was technically feasible to build.

Outcome

Connect was shelved before launch. The business shifted its focus to profitability, and a new platform wasn't where that investment was going. The work still proved the model: CPG teams needed a shared, structured way to access research, audience, and insight data rather than rebuilding it project by project each time.