PDP Strategy
A platform migration became the right moment to establish a consumer-needs framework for beauty product detail pages, with enough flexibility for different brands and categories, and scalable across the organization.
Role: Design Strategy Lead
〰️
Enterprise UX Strategy
〰️
Role: Design Strategy Lead 〰️ Enterprise UX Strategy 〰️
Estee Lauder Companies was moving its brand websites from an internal platform to Shopify. For most organizations, a migration like this is treated as a technical lift: move what exists, preserve what works to minimize disruption. But a platform migration is also one of the few moments when foundational decisions are genuinely up for reconsideration.
It was the right moment to ask “what should we be building?” and “what does a consumer actually need from a product detail page?"
The Challenge
My Role & Team
Design Strategy Lead, workshop design & facilitation
- 1 Content strategist
- 2 Design strategists
- Cross Functional Collaborators: Enterprise design team, product team, engineering team, brand product managers, online leadershipTimeline
2 MonthsProcess
To build a scalable and usable enterprise system required bringing the right people into the room and structuring the sessions so that each one built on the output of the previous one.By co-developing the framework with a cross- functional team, it meant they had ownership of the output before the synthesis work even began.
Workflow Overview
Workshops
Workshop #1
Establishing a shared foundation using the Jobs To Be Done framework.
Goal: surface and capture the full range of perspectives and build a shared understanding.
Key challenge: aligning enterprise-level and brand-level stakeholders.
Output:
- 3 guiding principles
- 10 consumer needs classifications
Workshop #2
Learning from examples, building expectations
Goal: Map consumer expectations to needs (from workshop #1)
Key challenge: prioritizing hierarchy of needs across all brands and categories
Output:
- Prioritized needs
- Mapped consumer expectations
- Reference examples per need
Workshop #3
Testing against current designs
Goal: Apply principles and prioritized need list to a live brand PDP, evaluating where the current experience aligned with the framework and where it fell short.
Key challenge: Stress-test the framework against something real, giving the team a shared view of the gap between current state and the standard they had just co-created.
Output:
Alignment and gap analysis against a current brand PDP
Output Frameworks
Frameworks in Action
From Transactional → Relational
By leveraging the frameworks, we worked with the design teams to craft content and page architecture that is more relevant and digestible for various shopper profiles, driving a renewed strategy that is less transactional and more relational.
Outcomes &
Lessons learned
Delivered
➔ Framework mapping prioritized consumer needs to page modules, differentiated across the four product categories
➔ Current enterprise wires annotated against the framework and hierarchy
➔ Annotated competitor PDPs as additional reference material for the enterprise design team
Key Result
➔ The framework is now the primary reference artifact for PDP enterprise wire design across the entire ELC Shopify migration (currently in progress).
“It’s so useful to have this artifact based on research to have important conversations with brands about how they can better structure their content.” - Content Strategy Team
“The prioritized needs framework and especially the category nuances have been extremely vital in guiding our design process.”
- Global Experience Design Team
My Takeaways
➔ Strategic timing ⟶ momentum
➔ Category nuance was crucial in driving flexibility and precision in the framework
➔ The workshop design matters as much as the synthesis by producing stakeholder buy-in and organizational legitimacy.
Role: Design Strategy Lead
Team: Content strategist · PMs · Enterprise UX + UI leads
Brand UX/UI designers · Developers · Product leadership
Deliverables: 3 collaborative work sessions + synthesis
Tags: Cloud Platform Migration, Enterprise UX Strategy, Workshop Design & Facilitation