The Key Lesson from My Biggest Commitment Fail as a Program Manager at L'Oreal

I see. That's a pretty interesting question. It's about when I fail to deliver on a commitment on a promise, promise that I made in a professional context. I think that I would have to go back to back when I worked as an area manager intern at L'Oreal in the travel retail division. And within L'Oreal, we primarily sold all of our merchandise through our retail partners at airports, at duty-free shops, and tax-free retail outlets. And it was my 2nd week on the job, and the situation, to give you some context, was that it was during the pandemic. And our sales were suffering tremendously at that

2nd week, 2nd week on the job, yeah. And sales for uh in A pretty bad shape, to be honest, because of

That's exactly it, because there were no passengers, there was nobody at airports, there was nobody to buy our merchandise at airport shops. And so, but the fact was that during the summer last year, we were expecting some uplift. This was before the Delta variant got big. We were expecting some kind of an uplift because people wanted to travel during the vacations during the summer, but at that point in time, for one of our categories within skincare, we saw that there was absolutely no lift for specific items in our portfolio. We saw that uh these specific product ranges were not performing well when compared to our competitors, based on the intelligence that we had. And at that point in time, a senior area manager within the team tasked me with finding out the reasons for non-performance of those product ranges. At that point in time, I remember that I actually dove deep into the raw data that we had on sales performance. I found out those specific product ranges. I found out data on Monthly sales, on weekly sales, and saw the variance that saw the drop. And then I actually compared that to the number of shops that we were operating in to see the, the, the magnitude of loss that we had. For example, there would be a larger, more significant loss of business in a larger shop, uh, let's say in Barcelona, when compared to Canary Islands. After making, making an assessment of the, the drop in business sales, I reached out to the area manager. I visualized the results using Power BI and explained that, that these other brands which are not doing so well, and these are the areas, these are the shops, these are the platforms where performance has been inadequate when compared to our forecasts. And I remember that she was pretty disappointed with the results because of the fact that I failed to reach out to our beauty advisors. I failed to reach out to our frontline sales staff in order to get an understanding of what's happening in the market. Uh, because, uh, of the fact that L'Oreal is pretty unique, travel retail is pretty unique. A lot of our information and competitive intelligence is directly from our frontline sales staff, from beauty, beauty advisors inside airports who inform us and tell us that our competitors, like, for example, like Clarence, like LVMH. They have sales ongoing, and we might expect our products to not sell as well during that specific week because of competing promotions. I failed to gather that information. I failed to find out that, that Clarence Royal Jelly Body Cream actually had a 3 for 2 sales ongoing, which meant that they would sell 3 units for the price of 2, and that had a direct impact on how we sold our merchandise at that point in time. So, that was one situation where I actually failed to gather all inputs related to the business situation. I failed to deliver on my commitment of informing and providing insights on sales performance to a, to a senior area manager at the, at that point in time. But, uh, I remember that the corrective actions which I took was that At that time, I reached out to a number of commercial analysts working within travel retail, supporting the business. I found out what best practices are at that point in time. And based on my intuition, I developed a template. I developed a framework which works for me. From next engagements on similar assignments related to finding out how performance is built, what I

For just tackling a similar situation on how to find out,

That's exactly it, a standard operating procedure. In terms of an SOP. What I did was I would first reach out to the, the area team. I would reach out to the beauty advisors directly and say that this is the situation. I need information on these product ranges. Could you please get back to me within 2 hours? And then, within that time frame, within 2 hours, I would actually work on the technical side. I would dive deep into the data to gather those technical insights on sellout, on sales performance, and use those 2 hours to visualize it. And at the end of that duration, I would combine the data from the beauty advisors and combine the data from our platform, from our data platform to have All bases covered, to have information from the field and information from the technical platform. That was the corrective action which I took after failing to deliver.

Absolutely. That's a good question. You know, I, I think that. There were a number of factors back then. The first was primarily the fact that our sales were not performing well. There was a 90% variance in what we expected in forecasts versus what actually happened in terms of sales performance. It was a really tough situation for the business and all area managers within the business felt that there was some pressure by our directors on us to perform and make sales happen. That was one. The 2nd was the fact that it was my 2nd week. I did not have a full handle, a full understanding of how procedures went on. And the 3rd was the fact that It was a super time sensitive assignment at that point in time. She needed it within. 3 hours and

It's just that. At that point in time, uh, Because of these factors. Time pressure. Uh, pressure to perform, pressure to make sales, and an incomplete understanding of actual business procedures when you're the new guy. Those are some reasons which I think that, that, that actually caused, uh, a gap. In my understanding of expectations versus what I delivered.

I, I realized that I messed up at the end, at, at the 3rd hour when I had to touch base with her and explain that I have this information which I derived from the technical platform with all of the data. And that's when she got back to me and she said that this isn't exactly what I was looking for. I thought that you would reach out to our area team, to our sales staff. Uh, it's, so, yeah, I did not actually touch base with her in the middle. So, like, for example, at the 19th minute. In the middle just to of course correct, just to get her feedback on my approach. Uh yeah. I did not realize that until the very end.