iQueue.ai
Category planner reviewing a planogram on a tablet in a store aisle

Category management

The Category Business Planning Team

Sixteen weeks to build a plan that sits in a notebook while the market diverges.

See a team workRead the price list

The problem

Nobody owns this problem, because it does not fit one department.

It takes sixteen weeks to build a plan that then sits in a notebook while the market diverges from it.

Retailer and suppliers plan blind to each other. The category captain has no validator in the room. The plan is negotiated across category, supply chain, finance, operations and HR with nobody owning the whole.

  • Cross-functional: category, supply chain, finance, operations, HR.
  • Requires interoperability between retailer and supplier systems and parties.
  • No single source of truth, and no single command structure across the negotiation.

Meet the team

Roles first. Named so you know who to ask, not to seem human.

Every member is a role with a defined scope of expertise, the data it reads, the decisions it owns and the point at which it must hand off. The name is only an identifier for that role instance.

Names are ours to start with. You can rename any member. Names editable

Sub-teams

A team is not flat. It has units, and units have squads.

Like a football team: an offense, a defense, a coaching staff, a scouting operation and a front office — and inside each, specialist squads. Pick a unit, then open a squad to see what it enacts and who is in it.

The structure from our architecture, instantiated: category use cases become the squads, each agent type taking a named job in the annual plan.

Coaching staff · 2 squads

The plan every squad answers to, and the orchestrator that sequences them.

A resume, not a feature list

What one member is actually accountable for.

Assortment & Space Planner

Priya Shah

Responsibilities

  • Sets share of space by profit, dollars or units, with weights the category director can adjust.
  • Builds brand-block planograms with an objective toggle so the trade-off is explicit.
  • Maintains cluster-level assortment down to the store where volume justifies it.

Decides alone

  • Space allocation inside the approved objective weights.
  • Cluster assignment for a store.
  • Facings within an agreed planogram frame.

Escalates to a human

  • Delisting a supplier item.
  • Any change to a contracted space commitment.
  • Resets requiring labor outside the approved window.

Measured on

  • Category profit per linear foot against plan.
  • Out-of-stock rate on cluster-specific items.
  • Reset execution accuracy at store level.

Works with

Maya Reyes · Theo Nakamura · Elena Lindqvist · Jonah Kim

Watch the team work

Signal to recorded decision.

  1. 01

    Signal

    A competitor cuts promo depth mid-quarter. The signal reaches the team the day the price file changes.

  2. 02

    Team forms

    Elena Lindqvist leads; Theo Nakamura, Maya Reyes and Jonah Kim join. Anticipatory Challenge starts interrogating immediately.

  3. 03

    Work

    Elasticity is re-run at cluster level. Theo shows where velocity has already left plan and what is recoupable this quarter.

  4. 04

    Pre-clearance

    Dana Vogel pre-clears capital, labor and blackout windows, and asks the questions the SVP will ask. Membranes keep supplier cost data on the supplier's side of the table.

  5. 05

    Decision recorded

    The revised plan, its rejected options, its recoup probability and its owner are recorded in the ledger and docked into the weekly financial review.

Capabilities

What the team does, week after week.

  • Continuous plan management with out-of-tolerance alerts and recoup probability.
  • Store- and cluster-level assortment.
  • Supplier war room with digital twins per supplier and SKU.
  • Live scenario defense during the negotiation, not after it.
  • Portfolio revenue assurance: every plan reconciled to the enterprise number.
  • Executive pre-clearance before the presentation.
  • Plans that dock into the budget cycle, the weekly financial review and the ad meeting.
  • Institutional memory: what this category decided, and why, across leadership changes.

Behind them, two crews

Portfolio Revenue Assurance — every plan across every category reconciled to the enterprise number, continuously, not at quarter end.

Anticipatory Challenge — continuous interrogation of plans while they are being built, so the hard question arrives before the executive does.

Two customers, one team

For the retailer: maximize the category. The team plans, defends and manages the whole category P&L.

For the supplier: maximize the brand, with a fair seat at the table — leveling the playing field for brands that cannot staff a category team.

The asymmetry is honest and governed by membranes. A supplier's agent can sit in a retailer's planning session without the supplier's cost data ever crossing the boundary.

Price list

Fixed price per job. Guaranteed result.

Prices are shown as units. Figures are set on your signed price list. Price placeholder

  • Category plan build

    Maya Reyes and crew

    Approved plan reconciled to the enterprise number.

    TBD per category / cycle

  • Continuous plan management

    Theo Nakamura

    Out-of-tolerance alerts inside stated hours, with recoup probability.

    TBD per category / month

  • Assortment and space reset

    Priya Shah

    Planogram set meeting the approved objective weights.

    TBD per category / reset

  • Scenario defense session

    Elena Lindqvist

    Live answers with evidence during the session.

    TBD per session

  • Supplier war room

    Jonah Kim

    Governed joint planning with no cost-data crossing.

    TBD per supplier / cycle

  • Executive pre-clearance

    Dana Vogel

    Pre-cleared capital, labor and blackout windows before presentation.

    TBD per plan

The guarantee

Everyone logs agent actions. We keep the books. Logs can't set a guaranteed price — books can.

Every competitor asks you to trust a demo. We ask you to read a contract.

Every digital worker is bonded

Each member of each team carries a bond. The team is accountable for the work, not just for the effort.

Fixed price, guaranteed result

Every job sits on a price list with a stated result. No seats. No token meters. If a job fails, we pay.

We keep the books

For every job we have ever run we hold what it cost, which model ran it, and whether it worked — pooled across thousands of organizations.

Read the price list

Hire the team. Keep the plan alive.

Read the price listSee how it works