BrandPulse — Product Case Study

A weekly AI-powered intelligence dashboard for CPG brand managers Built for the APM Interview · Case Study Round · March 2026

🔗 Live Prototype || GitHub Link ||👤 Hariharan S · APM

📌 Quick Overview


Product type	SaaS B2B Dashboard
Target user	Brand Managers · CPG / FMCG industry
Core problem	Brand managers spend 3–4 hours every Monday stitching together data manually before their strategy meeting
Solution	One dashboard. 5 minutes. One clear decision per tab
Features built	5 core features + AI layer
Data sources	6 source categories
Prototype	Fully interactive — live on GitHub Pages

1️⃣ Problem Definition

The Core Insight

Brand managers in CPG don't lack data. They lack a single, weekly view that connects trends, competition, and opportunity into decisions they can act on — before the window closes.

Target User

Priya, 32 — Brand Manager at a mid-size FMCG company Managing 2–3 personal care brands, Priya sits between the marketing and business teams. Her job is to grow market share and stay ahead of consumer shifts — but she spends more time gathering data than acting on it.

The Pain Today

⏱ 3–4 hours every Monday — manually stitching together data from Google Trends, social media, sales dashboards, and competitor news before her strategy meeting
📊 Fragmented data sources — trends in one tool, competitor data in another, sales in a third. No single view of the full picture
📉 Always late to the trend — by the time she connects the dots, the trend has often already peaked and competitors have already moved
🎯 Gut-feel decisions — with no single source of truth, Priya makes decisions based on incomplete data and can't always defend them to stakeholders

Core Jobs to be Done

JOB 1 — Is this trend worth acting on, or is it too early or too late?
JOB 2 — How is my brand tracking vs. competitors this week, and why is the gap moving?
JOB 3 — Where is the biggest whitespace opportunity I should pitch in the next planning cycle?