Grow the Pie, Then Go Check the Shelf: The Real Job of Category Management

Growing the category is only half the job. The other half is finding out whether the plan you sold in ever made it onto the shelf.

A planogram that gets approved in a line review looks settled. The problem is that approval and execution are two different events, and most category teams only ever see the first one. Storesight’s Henry Ho (Chief Strategy Officer) and Marc Yount (President & Chief Operating Officer) sit down with Abby Horsager, Sr. Customer Success Manager at Storesight, who spent more than six years in category management and growth analytics at Procter & Gamble, to work out what the function is actually responsible for and where the work quietly stops.

In this conversation:

• What the best buyers can spot in your data before you finish presenting it
• How a category manager with no official captaincy ended up drawing a retailer’s mods anyway
• Why bringing a gift to your buyer has nothing to do with stuff
• Which questions to hand AI when you already have more data than any team can synthesize
• Why the junior analyst role is changing, and what an organization gives up if it stops training people how to think
• Which categories are now fighting for store space rather than shelf space, and what that changes about the story you bring
• What a supplier found when she went and checked whether her behind-glass mods at Walmart were actually set
• Why one wrong number does not end your credibility, and what does

Rather than treating category management as work that ends when the planogram is approved, this conversation reframes it as two jobs that only count together. Grow the pie with a story the buyer can act on, then go check the shelf to see whether the plan you sold in is the one shoppers are standing in front of.

About Storesight
Formed by the merger of Field Agent and Shelfgram, Storesight delivers always-on retail intelligence for CPG brands. By combining a massive shopper network with advanced AI and image recognition, Storesight provides a continuous, objective view of in-store conditions, helping category teams bring competitive evidence to the buyer, verify that approved planograms are actually set in the field, and turn shelf reality into action.

Today, Storesight captures shelf conditions across 480 categories, 5,000 brands, and 50,000 locations, and is trusted by 95% of the top 50 CPG companies in North America.

Learn more about Storesight: https://storesight.com/

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