Designing the Future of Recommendations with Walmart Connect
Sometimes, the right timing and the right people can turn a “small tweak” into an inflection point. What started as an iteration on budget recommendations grew into a roadmap-shaping strategy, unifying scattered features into a scalable system, and ultimately proving design deserves a seat at the table.
🌱 The Seed: A Vision without Permission
When I joined Walmart Connect, the ad platform was complicated, disjointed, and a jargony jumble. The roadmap was unclear, and as a newly formed design team, we didn’t have much context or influence. But we saw an opportunity: Walmart was pivoting to serve third-party sellers, and we had the chance to design a more intuitive, guided experience, especially for novice advertisers.
As a design team of 12, we kicked things off with a series of vision workshops. We explored what a unified, supportive experience could look like, where the platform didn’t just enable campaigns, it also advised and guided users throughout, anticipating needs and offering timely, relevant support.
Based on user sentiment on how complicated optimizing ad campaigns can be, a recurring concept kept surfacing: recommendations. At the time, they were a fractured and inconsistent experience in the product, but we saw their potential as a tool for trust and advertiser success.
Key Learning:
Though we didn’t yet have buy-in from product or engineering, sometimes you can’t wait for perfect conditions.Though we didn’t yet have buy-in from product or engineering, sometimes you can’t wait for perfect conditions.
✨ The Opportunity: When Vision Finds its Moment
Weeks later, I was asked to iterate on budget recommendations. Instead of approaching it as adding a simple UI, I zoomed out. I revisited the vision work and asked the product team: Where is this going? I shared our workshop concepts and proposed an expanded strategy. And eureka! It clicked. Product partners, although hesitant about timelines, saw the potential.
🤝 Winning Buy-In: Advocating with Evidence and Empathy
To get alignment with the team, I used different strategies:
For product: I brought in user feedback and framed how our proposed changes could improve adoption by addressing user skepticism, lack of context, and flow disruption.
For engineering: I did an audit showing our inconsistent UI patterns and scalability issues across widgets and workflows.
Initial resistance was high. The team had just shipped these features to the homepage and All Campaigns page. But momentum was building and I advocated for a fast-follow to ensure a consistent user experience across upcoming initiatives.
Key Learning:
Come prepared, share the facts, and bring people along for the ride.
👯 Momentum: Iterations & Cross-Team Scaling
As conversations continued, the idea of having a scalable recommendations experience caught traction with the other teams I was working with:
Budget Team: expanded the feature and agreed to fast-follows across surfaces.
Bidding Strategy Team: Integrated recommendations into their V1 launch.
Items Team → Optimization Opportunities Team (OpOp): Broadened scope to own and evolve the end-to-end recommendations experience.
🎨 The Design: Research-Led Vision Come to Life
Earlier iterations focused on ease of application, but user testing revealed that context was the real gap. As the vision scaled beyond Sponsored Search, I partnered with design to align patterns and with content strategy to define clear, consistent messaging:
We would have progressive disclosure. Instead of pushing for quick-apply, users could choose to dig deeper and receive full context, rationale, and the option to apply. This gave users time to digest, learn, and trust the system.
Each recommendation should communicate: action, benefit, and mechanism. Users wanted to know why a recommendation mattered, what it would change, and how it aligned with their goals.
Reflection:
Had time and resources allowed, I would have conducted a round of validation testing before launch to ensure we were reaching users at the right moment, with the right visual style and context.