Dell Technologies · Pricing & Promotions · Dec 2025 – Jan 2026
One price,
eight tools.
Some of Dell’s business customers were calling sales to ask if they could buy as consumers. I led design on the concept that fixed why.
The ask vs.
the real problem
The brief was to digitize how Dell creates promotions and prices products for Dell.com (B2C) and Premier (B2B). Large parts of the process still ran on spreadsheets.
The process touched eight teams: marketing, pricing, merchandising, business, part of sales, and the GOPO, ESO and Cost teams, across eight tools. A business team spent much of its time going tool to tool, making sure they all showed the same numbers.
Digitizing the spreadsheets would have sped up each step. It wouldn’t have fixed what the research surfaced.
Research: watching the work, not just asking about it
We ran 8 to 10 sessions: an interview with someone from each team, shadowing them through their real tools, and silent observation of sales calls with end customers. A short last round checked what we thought we had learned.
Across teams, the same pattern kept coming up:
“When the quarter changes, there is a long delay for the information to flow. This triggers incorrect prices on Dell.com and other sales tools.”
“There is no link between teams — without offline alignment between segments, errors happen.”
“We have multiple pricing services on Dell.com, each using a different logic for price calculations. And the systems don’t talk to each other.”
“There is no page where teams can audit Premier data or pull a report by order code from live prices. That makes finding and fixing price errors harder.”
Shadowing made the cost concrete. Walking us through a price change, a business team member connected the dots themselves: missing one tool is why some business customers call asking to buy as consumers. Interviews told us the process was fragmented; shadowing showed us what that fragmentation cost.
Three decisions
From digitizing a process to one shared view
I reframed the project from “put the spreadsheets online” to “give every team one view of the same promotion and price”. The principle: everyone sees the whole process; each team edits only what it owns.
Merchandising can see what marketing is setting up, but can’t change it. Every value has one owner and one source. As the Cost team told us, each pricing service used its own logic — one source removes the inconsistency at its root, instead of adding another check on top of eight tools.
Scoping by risk when the timeline shrank
Midway through, the timeline was cut: engineering had started building before there was a concept, and design had to catch up.
We mapped each user profile by business risk and value against the time it would take to design for them. I proposed focusing on pricing and merchandising — the two teams that create every price and promotion. Getting the data right at the source would also reach GOPO and ESO, who adjusted those prices downstream. The directors approved it.
Building on the customer-facing design system
Dell’s design system was made for Dell.com and Premier, not for dense internal tools. To cut development time, we were asked to use it as far as it would go.
I chose not to fight that on this timeline. The cost was real. Some screens are less dense than an internal tool should be. I’d make the same call again, and push for internal-tool components as a separate track.
Validation: from a calendar to a decision screen
We validated with users from the same teams who hadn’t been in the research, asking two things: does this solve the problem, or part of it? And does each screen make sense — its content, order and hierarchy?
The biggest change was structural. Our first concept was built around a calendar of promotions, with dense data tables and expandable cards. Users didn’t decide by date; they decided by data. The calendar and the heavy tables went, and the concept became a modular data screen that supports each team’s decision, with the same structure for every role.
Validation also added something new: an AI layer that researches prices, competitors and market data, and brings the findings to the home screen — so teams start from context instead of hunting for it.
Where it landed
The concept and prototype covered pricing and merchandising directly, and GOPO and ESO downstream. They were validated with users and approved by the directors. The work was moving into the next phase when I left Dell in early 2026.
What I’d do differently
I’d push for design to join before engineering starts building. Much of the timeline pressure came from starting without a concept. Next time I’d make that cost visible on day one, in the directors’ terms: rework, time to market and pricing errors.
One idea we didn’t get to design: letting teams request and approve changes inside the tool, instead of over email, Slack or Teams. It was the natural next step for the shared view.