Large CPG teams don't struggle on Amazon for lack of effort or expertise. They struggle because their operating rhythm hasn't kept pace with the complexity of the business, so KPIs pile up, decisions blur, new items stall on unclear ownership, and teams spend more time reacting than executing. On an episode of MerchantSpring Marketplace Masters, Donte McClain, co-founder of Willse-McClain Advisory and a veteran of Amazon transformation at Unilever, Newell and Hershey and of leading a 200-plus-person media team at Flywheel Digital, laid out how to tune that rhythm. The through-line, as host Paul Sonneveld put it, is that most Amazon problems aren't new; they're repeated, and fixing them takes clearer decisions and ownership, not more dashboards.
Why Q1 Is The Moment To Tune The Machine
McClain makes the case for late February as the ideal tuning window. It's the top of the year, still close enough to reconcile last year's realities, yet far enough in, roughly 60 days, to react on evidence rather than opinion, and early enough to adjust without panic. Q1 also exposes friction early: inventory constraints, forecasts starting to drift, content gaps, agency handoffs where budgets never reached the right hands. And while the annual plan is nominally set, its inputs are not, budgets, priorities, accountability, promo cadences and media efficiencies are all variables you can still move, to reconcile if you're drifting or to pour fuel on the fire if you're ahead. It is, as Sonneveld noted, late enough for cracks to show but early enough that the year is still recoverable.
Four Warning Signs Before Revenue Dips
You don't have to wait for results to slide to know the operating model is straining. McClain watches four leading, pre-revenue indicators. The first is meeting proliferation: more forums and fewer decisions, decks built for the sake of building decks. The second is escalation frequency, not the occasional fire drill, which is normal, but a perpetual cycle of leaders being dragged into operational problems, the Slack chaos that keeps teams off the ball. The third is duplicate reporting, the sign that there's no shared source of truth and no agreed North Star. The fourth is launch delays, an accumulation of missed innovation gates.
His diagnostic is a simple fire-drill test: ask the team how many fire drills you had last quarter, and whether they were the same ones you're firefighting now. If they rhyme, the cause is upstream, in the processes and cross-functional handoffs, and that's where to root-cause a fix rather than treating each flare-up as a one-off.
Pick The Six To Eight KPIs That Actually Drive Decisions
Large organisations tend to track everything, which is a way of tracking nothing. McClain filters candidate KPIs through three questions: Does someone actually own it? Is there a threshold that triggers a decision? And does a change in the metric change what you do? If the answer to any of those is no, cut it, because a metric nobody owns and nothing responds to is vanity. The North Star for a big brand should be profitable growth, sales and share with real emphasis on profitability, and every KPI beneath it needs a clear owner (MerchantSpring has a primer on the Amazon metrics worth measuring).
As a starting set of six to eight, McClain points to ordered revenue versus plan, in-stock level and availability, new-item ramp and velocity against forecast, media efficiency (ROAS, incrementality or new-to-brand rate depending on the campaign's job), content quality and search ranking, and the operational and financial health metrics such as chargebacks and the other costs of servicing Amazon. The specific list matters less than the discipline: each one earns its place only if it has an owner, a trigger, and a consequence.
What Good KPI Ownership Actually Looks Like
Ownership is where most scorecards fall down, so McClain makes it concrete with the in-stock rate. Supply chain and the vendor-ops lead sit closest to that number, and the target might be 95% or better. Set the traffic lights: green at 95% and above, yellow in the 90 to 94% band, red below 90%, with explicit actions at each. In yellow, the owner investigates root cause and flags cross-functional teammates, crucially the media team, because you don't want to keep driving ads and eyes to a listing that can't convert on thin stock. In red, you escalate further, potentially to executive leadership if a flagship item is exposed, kick off purchase-order reviews, and pull in your Amazon vendor manager for support.
The point is that good ownership takes the politics out of it: the system, not a personality, decides when to execute or escalate. Tie every action to a time-bound due date and make the action and its impact visible to the rest of the team. That who, when, why and how is exactly the discipline that lets operations scale when a lot is happening on Amazon at once.
New-Item Launches: Retail, Media, Then Scale
McClain structures new-item launches as three sequential readiness gates, and the sequence is the whole trick. Gate one is retail readiness: the ASIN live and suppression-free, strong content (increasingly critical as Rufus and other AI tools reshape how shoppers search), in-stock availability, reviews, and competitive pricing, all with named owners internally and across agency partners. Gate two is media readiness, and his firm rule is not to activate media until retail readiness is solid and real demand is showing. Only then do you build out search, DSP and broader campaigns, set budget clarity and a spend tipping point, confirm content-score signals, and lean on clean rooms like Amazon Marketing Cloud for granular audience targeting and test-and-learn.
Gate three is scale readiness: close collaboration on how the plan is tracking, velocities against forecast, supply-chain health, retail-media performance against benchmarks, and the fluid decisions- sustain, scale or pause- that follow. Underpinning all of it is a tight test-and-learn repository so that at the end of a launch you've captured both what worked and the fail-forwards. Activating media before retail is ready, the most common mistake, just spends money driving traffic to an experience that isn't set up to convert.
Make Meetings Decisions, Not Status Updates
Given that meeting proliferation is warning sign number one, the weekly huddle has to earn its slot. McClain's answer is yes to a weekly, provided it's a decision meeting, not a status meeting. Run it off the exceptions list, not the steady-eddy of everything going to plan; keep a tight agenda and a decision log walking through launch gates and triage; and make sure the people with authority to enact change are in the room, so you leave with clarity on the exceptions, who owns each action, and by when. He also builds in culture, a Win Wednesday-style shout-out for the team, because e-commerce is a collective effort, provided it never bloats the timeline.
The same discipline feeds the learning loop that stops repeated mistakes. Beyond the weekly, McClain runs a cross-functional quarterly review against what the team said it would do, what it learned, and how those learnings apply next quarter, and democratises the fail-forwards in a shared internal repository so wins and misses are visible to everyone. As the market shifts toward agentic commerce, he argues, the brands that will cope are the ones that have done the brilliant basics, strong SEO and answer-engine optimisation, inside a regimented learning cadence rather than a series of one-off scrambles.
One Source Of Truth, So The Team Can Decide
McClain's point isn't that teams need more dashboards; it's that they need one shared source of truth so KPI owners can act on exceptions instead of reconciling conflicting reports. That's the job MerchantSpring is built for: unified, owned KPIs across your vendor and seller accounts, with the profitability, in-stock and media signals your weekly huddle and launch gates run on (see how enterprise brands use it). Book a walkthrough of your own accounts.
