Design strategy
Design strategist . Product designer
I got contacted by an entrepreneurial couple starting to develop their business. They wanted to offer an online networking platform where the startup market could connect and grow. This meant giving a face to startups and entrepreneurs from a wide range of industries, connecting them, making them visible to potential investors or 3rd party services and offering relevant information per industry.
Challenges
Shaping an MVP
To untangle a product idea is not an easy task. We had to make sure we understood the user needs and market fit of this project, to be able to define an MVP that would place Ufaced in an advantageous market position.
As any business on the initial phases, there were diverse interpretations, high expectations and the desire to include every possible stakeholder in their product.
With a very wide scope, where did it make sense to start?
Design process
Tight budget
Poorly scoped projects are money eaters. Being this an entrepreneur project, we had to establish a product direction with what was available on the table. At the same time we had to scope the next steps according to the business real budget.
Analyse
Proto Persona discovery
Scenario exploration
Competitor benchmark
Syncretize
Insight analysis
Feature prioritization
Ideate
MVP Wireframes
Deliver
Defined MVP requirements from an experience POV
Both owners had different opinions on why a feature should form part of the platform, which groups of users to cater to and the relationships between these user groups. A lot of things were still in discussion, and they had the will to work this through, so I proposed to make a series of workshops that would help them and me shape better the concrete value UFaced offered to their market.
They had interviewed several potential users to measure their interest in a networking platform and they had some lights on who wanted to be seen and who wanted to see others. The first challenge was to group all of them and understand their connecting relationships and needs, to then decant which of those would make sense inside of the platform. We started with a workshop to define UFaced proto personas.
Workshops
1
Setting the topic to the people they had interviewed, I asked them to write everything that came to mind in regards to these people.
2
I asked them to silently place the post its on a board and then to group them as they felt they belong together.
3
Then I asked them to explain why each of them thought these people belonged together, allowing them also to move the post its to other groups if they felt that way after hearing the comments of their business partner.
By the end of this process, we managed to define 4 proto-personas:
Startups . Interested parties . Companies . Entrepreneurs
Finding the (proto) personas
Once we narrowed down the first proto-personas, we defined also the goals each proto persona wanted to reach within the startup scene and started assembling scenarios.
Scenario mapping and feature discovery
We would map each step the proto-persona would take to achieve the goal in blue post its on a timeline.
Which questions would arise in the mind of our users to go from on step to the next?. We wrote all questions we thought the user could have in yellow post-its.
Then we noted down the real world actions the user would take to progress from step to step in pink post-its.
Here I added an ideation step, I prompted them to consider how the Ufaced platform could support this scenario in each step and write it in orange post-its. This gave us a map, for this scenario, of the features they were thinking of providing.
They did this exercise on their own coming up with a list of scenarios per proto-persona and a tangible set of features.
At the same time, I analyzed their competition and along with the participation of their technical lead, we were able to work on and prioritize which features provided Ufaced's unique value and therefore become a must for the MVP.
Syncretizing an MVP
Ufaced minimum viable product
Proto-personas and Scenarios
Competitor analysis
Features prioritization and technical feasibility study
Design
Marketing
RnD
To effectively understand which product are we are building and why, the input of several business areas is crucial. It is in the sustaining together the current needs of the targeted users, the market and competitors movements and the technical possibilities and current feasibility, that the business will be able to make an informed decision, create a business plan and come up with a budget estimation to step forward.
Why creating a value proposition is even more relevant to a business than the creating an MVP
In a project with a bit more resource bandwidth, it would be important to take the time and syncretize between various departments the product's value proposition in words, and support it with at least 3 intended experiences. Having this value proposition clear allows to map all further business decisions and development compromises back to the original business intent, and provides the team and business of a compass with which to continuously realign even on moments where all stakes are high and compromises must be made.
Through a series of long reviews, we worked out together each wireframe detail, they started to see their product’s different faces. With the mindset of “each action has a reaction”, I could guide their new ideas or modifications and show them how they affected the logic and scope of their product. It was no longer an abstract discussion!
Towards the end they were thinking on each feature and considering the dependencies between each of them, they were grateful for having a clear structure and logic on Ufaced. There is still a lot to do, but freezing the MVP requirements was a milestone.
One day, at a team meeting, they told me they had been thinking based on all of the work we had done so far, and had concluded that creating an MVP for four different types of user roles was very ambitious. They considered the implications of going to the market as a very general tool instead of one focused on where they could deliver value, so they decided to scope down the project to attend only two of the personas.
Pivoting the scope
Project achievements
1
Found and establish a set of proto personas and real life scenarios from which the business could take informed product decisions.
2
Created a wide view of valuable features for Ufaced and prioritized them based on competitors, available tech, time and budget capacities.
Looking ahead
I failed to understand early enough their budget and time capacities. Soon I realized that the research plan established was way bigger than Ufaced could afford.
This allowed me to understand the importance of discussing this topic openly during the agreement phase, as to set clear expectations, to provide the flexibility the clients really need and to tackle the money / time topic upfront so that it doesn't become a taboo once things start to grow in complexity.
Research is crucial for product development and it is very important to agree on a way of doing it that adapts to the client's budget.
3
Facilitated pivoting and re-scoping of the project to fit the budget using the existing wireframes as map and supporting the decisions on the research and tech assessment that had been created.