Establishing a Unified Product Taxonomy Across Platforms
This work focused on establishing a shared product taxonomy across platforms to improve consistency, reduce fragmentation, and support scalable decision-making.
Company: Macy’s
My Role: Product design lead partnering with product, engineering, and merchandising teams
Scope: Defining and implementing a unified product taxonomy across web and mobile platforms to align navigation, discovery, and downstream systems
Constraints: Legacy category structures, cross-team dependencies, SEO considerations, and platform-specific limitations
The Problem
Teams were required to make frequent, high-impact decisions using incomplete and inconsistently structured data. Existing systems prioritized data aggregation over trust and decision clarity, leading to workarounds, duplicated effort, and increased operational risk.
Why This Was Hard
The challenge was not a lack of data or effort, but the interaction between:
– Multiple teams interpreting the same cost data differently
– Legacy systems with rigid structural constraints
– A high cost of errors driven by inaccurate or delayed information
My Responsibility
My responsibility was to bring clarity to the decision space—aligning teams around shared mental models, surfacing tradeoffs, and designing systems that could scale beyond a single workflow.
Framing the Decision Space
Before exploring the solution, it was critical to identify the specific decisions category managers needed to make, the signals required to support those decisions, and the constraints shaping what was possible within the system.