Simplifying Inventory Intake for Construction Junction Staff
For seven months, our team partnered with Pittsburgh nonprofit Construction Junction to rethink how donated inventory moves from the warehouse to the retail floor. I led as Product Manager and helped turn months of field research into working prototypes now moving toward implementation.
My role
Product Manager
Timeline
January to July 2026
My team
1 product manager (me!)
2 product strategists
2 designers
Client
Construction Junction
The Original Brief
Construction Junction came to us looking for ways to reach new customers and reverse declining revenue.
As a 26-year-old nonprofit, they were seeing a 16% year-over-year revenue decline and wanted CMU's help attracting a younger, digital-first customer base as their own customer base was aging out.
But, as we spent time inside the organization, we found the problem started much earlier in their workflows…
The Challenge
Construction Junction's inventory process wasn't keeping up with the needs of its staff, customers, or business.
Years of workarounds, inconsistent cataloging, and an understaffed team made it difficult to maintain reliable inventory data. That affected more than internal operations: CJ struggled to understand what it had, customers couldn't reliably discover available inventory, and leadership had limited data to make business decisions.
The Solutions
Three Solutions. A stronger, more connected workflow.
Instead of treating inventory management as one universal workflow, we designed tools around the two environments where staff use them: Warehouse Intake and the Retail Floor.
01
Reuse Retail App Redesign
We streamlined a cumbersome ~30 field intake form into a focused, 8-9 field workflow optimized for touch screens on busy loading docks. Features include auto-generated item titles, structured data inputs, and guided decisions between stock vs. unique items.
Built and led by
Me :)
Tanisha Smith
02
CJ Studio
A web-based product imagery and social media processing tool that uses background removal, resolution enhancement, automated centering, and branded templates.
Built and led by
03
Staff Onboarding & Training
We reorganized the experience to match how staff actually process donations. The new flow guides staff from donor information to item type, photos, and key details in the order they naturally need them.
Built and led by
What We Learned
Research showed us that the biggest opportunities were inside their internal operations.
We spent time with staff across Construction Junction to understand how donations enter the building, how inventory moves through the store, and where the existing tools broke down.
Spending time in the store showed us how much staff were doing to keep inventory moving despite interruptions, disconnected workflows, and gaps in their existing tools.
20+
Staff & stakeholder interviews
14
Interruptions every hour
17%
Of intake fields used by staff
Constant interruptions
Staff regularly switched between customers, donations, pricing, and inventory.
Staff workarounds
Employees had developed workarounds to compensate for gaps in the system.
Different needs
Warehouse intake and retail inventory management required different workflows.
The workflow itself needed attention.
Staff regularly switched between customers, donations, pricing, and inventory.
Constraints
From the beginning, Construction Junction asked us to create something realistic.
We kept coming back to that word as we explored the solution space. Any solution had to work within their budget, existing technology, and the day-to-day habits staff had built over years of using Reuse Retail.
Our research also challenged the assumption that every inefficient workflow needed to be replaced. Staff had developed workarounds they knew well, and changing too much at once would require them to relearn processes they could already navigate. We focused the redesign on the parts of the system where change would have the greatest value: improving accessibility, reducing unnecessary cognitive load, and making inventory data more consistent.
That last piece mattered beyond the interface. Inconsistent item names and pricing practices made the data flowing into Salesforce difficult to analyze, limiting CJ's ability to understand its inventory and make informed business decisions. The redesign gave us an opportunity to introduce more structure without disrupting the workflows staff depended on.
Familiar workflows were hard to change
Staff relied on years of workarounds, and both management and staff were hesitant to adopt major changes or AI.
The solution had to be practical
Limited funding, staffing, and technical capacity meant anything we designed needed to be affordable, maintainable, and quick to put into practice.
CJ couldn't trust its inventory data
Inconsistent records and decade-old “ghost inventory” made Salesforce unreliable.
The Outcome
Our work helped secure $30,000 in funding to move the solutions toward implementation, giving Construction Junction a path to continue the work after our team stepped away.
Takeaways
Learning when to keep pushing and when to move forward.
Capstone taught me that doing good work on a team requires more than having high standards. I care deeply about the quality of what I produce, and my instinct is often to keep refining until I feel confident in it. Over seven months, I learned that sometimes the better decision is to align, make the decision, and keep the team moving.
My role also changed throughout the project. I started as Product Manager and later moved into a more hands-on design and prototyping role, but I found myself moving between the two whenever the team needed it. That experience taught me that leadership doesn't always come from a title.