Flow & RFI Builder

GroupM's commerce team ran their entire RFI process through spreadsheets and email threads. Coca-Cola and 100+ retail partners were exchanging documents manually — no shared workspace, no version control, no visibility into where any evaluation stood. This was 2023.

Cycles that should take days stretched to weeks. There was no centralized way to know which retailers had completed and returned an RFI, or whether their data had even been ingested. Leadership couldn't see pipeline status without chasing someone down.

Before wireframing anything, the team evaluated two approaches to the core problem. The 4-month MVP window made the decision straightforward.

Product and engineering agreed: data parsing for Option 1 was too time-consuming to build within four months. Option 2 meant more design work upfront, but data would live in the platform automatically from day one. That was the right trade-off.

Stakeholder interviews revealed the biggest pain wasn't the data itself — it was the handoff moments: sending, receiving, following up, confirming completion. That's where Flow had to be airtight.

RFI Builder — a step-by-step guided flow for brand teams. Section-by-section structure, deadline setting, and retailer assignment in one place. The builder itself is table-based: admins add rows and columns and configure each question type inline. RFIs contain a mix of short answer, long answer, single select, and multi-select questions, so the builder needed to handle all of them without requiring a custom question editor. Following the WPP Design System kept the implementation within scope for the 4-month timeline.

Clone RFI was a must-have. Many clients share the same retailers and commerce capabilities across evaluation cycles. Rebuilding from scratch each time would have eliminated most of the efficiency gain. One click to duplicate and adjust.

Admin permissions — not everyone on the commerce team needed access to every Flow. Designing the role assignment step (who gets admin access to which Flow and at what level) was a separate design problem built into the creation stepper, not a separate settings page. Keeping it in context meant it rarely got skipped.

Retailer response view — stripped back and task-focused. Retailers see exactly what is being asked, respond inline, save drafts, and submit with a clear confirmation state.

Status dashboard — live view of every active RFI, response rates per retailer, and overdue flags. Leadership visibility without needing to ask anyone.

The original RFI Builder put every question on a single page. In early testing with GroupM's brand-side clients — teams at Coca-Cola and Nestlé — three problems surfaced immediately: the page felt impossible to scan, users lost their place when they stepped away, and the visual experience didn't meet the expectations of enterprise-level software.

The fix was to restructure the experience into a guided multi-step flow — questions broken into logical groups, one section at a time, with a step indicator showing progress. Usability feedback shifted from frustrated to confident, and the form no longer felt like a wall of work.