Starting with Consumer Needs: How Lisa Built Comprehensive Category Management Capabilities at Coupang

Nearly four years into her journey at Coupang, Lisa Ting has managed categories ranging from baby diapers, formula, and baby food to everyday essentials. She is now a Principal Brand Manager responsible for the tissue category.

Each category comes with different market conditions, consumer behaviors, and ways of working with brands, giving Lisa opportunities to continuously broaden her understanding of category management. From product assortment, market analysis, and brand partnerships to inventory planning and cross-functional collaboration, a Brand Manager needs not only to understand data, but also to translate consumer needs and market changes into concrete decisions.

What initially attracted Lisa to Coupang was the opportunity to build and explore new possibilities in the Taiwan market. For her, this also meant working beyond established processes, gaining exposure to different categories, contributing to strategy development, and building business judgment through real decisions.

Identifying Category Growth Opportunities Through Consumer Use Cases

Take the tissue category she currently manages as an example. Pull-out tissues are a widely used tissue format among consumers in Taiwan, while different everyday situations also create demand for products such as hand towels, kitchen paper towels, and pocket tissues. Lisa therefore experimented with shifting the product classification from a primarily brand-based approach to one organized around function and usage occasion. After testing the new structure, both page click-through rates and purchase conversion rates improved significantly.

She also observed that selling tissues only by the case may not suit the storage capacity or usage needs of smaller households or people living in rented homes. The team therefore introduced more options in different pack sizes and quantities. For Lisa, the core of category management is not simply adding more products. It is about understanding how consumers use them and adjusting product selection and purchase options accordingly.

Making Decisions Through Change and Building a Broader Business Perspective

Beyond consumer needs, Brand Managers must also continuously assess changes in the market. During the early development of the Taiwan market, some brands were still cautious about working with new retail channels. In addition to reviewing sales and market data, Lisa visited physical retail stores to understand product displays, pricing strategies, and supply chain conditions. Based on these insights, she developed partnership proposals that better reflected brands’ actual considerations, helping establish collaborations with several major brands.

Earlier this year, when raw material and packaging costs were expected to rise, she proactively assessed market demand, inventory risks, and upcoming marketing plans, and recommended increasing inventory in advance. Demand later rose quickly, and the additional stock allowed the team to respond more effectively to market changes.

These experiences have also reinforced the importance of cross-functional collaboration for Lisa. From CRM and marketing to logistics and supplier support, Brand Managers frequently need to bring together information from different teams so that product planning, campaigns, and supply arrangements remain aligned. This way of working has helped her move beyond managing a single category and gradually build a more comprehensive business perspective.

Lisa believes that past experience can support better judgment, but it can also lead people to apply familiar answers too quickly. Before making a decision, she therefore makes a point of identifying the actual cause of a problem before determining the next step.

For those looking to build a career as a Brand Manager, Coupang offers more than experience managing a single category. It provides the opportunity to take part in how a category is built, adjusted, and grown. A Brand Manager’s work is a continuous process of finding answers, and Coupang provides an environment where individuals can expand their capabilities more quickly. Through ongoing exposure to supply chain operations, marketing, logistics, customer behavior, and business data, Brand Managers can better understand how individual decisions affect product performance and the customer experience. Over time, their role can develop from executing individual tasks to making broader business judgments and solving more complex problems.