Catalogue operations12 min read
Structuring a catalogue team
Most catalogue teams are one person and a hope. Here is what the roles look like when they are made explicit.
ReadIn most distribution businesses the catalogue team is one person who also does something else. That works at a few hundred products and becomes the constraint on growth somewhere between two and five thousand.
The useful exercise is to name the functions before you name the people, because the functions exist whether or not anybody owns them. Acquisition: getting product information out of suppliers and into your systems — the most time-consuming and the most automatable. Curation: deciding what good looks like, which is a judgement role and the one most often left unfilled. Production: writing, editing, cropping, checking. Publishing: approving, syncing, and handling what breaks.
Under roughly 2 000 products one person can hold all four, with real advantages — no handover cost, complete context, fast decisions. Two things have to be managed. Curation gets squeezed, because it is the only function without a deadline and it loses to production every time. And everything that person knows exists nowhere else, so decisions need encoding as rules and configurations rather than left as habits.
The absence of curation has a recognisable signature: a category tree nobody can explain, the same attribute under three different names, no definition of complete, and every supplier onboarded slightly differently. Curation is perhaps four hours a month at 5 000 products. Skipping it costs a quarter of remediation work later.
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