Who really is our customer? That was the big question we faced at Weengs, where I’d just joined as part of a new Product team. The business was serving too many segments which meant at the time it was unscalable.
After a deep, three week customer discovery process we presented an insight report to our founders and CEO. Our recommendations sparked an even bigger research project in the race to find true product/market fit.
Firstly we put together a high-level plan based on the design thinking and lean startup methodology.
Having survived just fine without a Product team during its first 3 years, our arrival at Weengs was understandably met with a little skepticism. So our job was to also convince those who weren’t used to this way of thinking.
The first week was mostly spent with our customer-facing departments. Like a sponge, absorbing everything we could!
In parallel we ran some preliminary market research to get an updated snapshot of the Ecommerce landscape.
Next we aligned with relevant department heads - the key stakeholders - to generate a list of assumptions we’d test across our range of customers.
The aim was to understand their attitudes, values and pain points. We wanted to know which segment would benefit most from using Weengs, both now and in the future.
With a lot of assumptions to test at once, it made sense to break them up into the most appropriate methods. We based this on: how complex the question was, if it related to a specific part of the journey, how many data points we’d need etc. I settled on:
With the findings we were able to pinpoint 4 main segments which we’d use to build personas:
The independent store
The marketplace
The aspiring boutique
The e-tailer
To build a full picture of our customer’s experience I also supported and ran weekly user groups with internal teams. Each week we’d choose a topic to cover, e.g. invoices, tracking, claims... And then hand-pick team members from those departments who’d act as our experts.
Using workshop tools and methods we unearthed the good, the bad and the ugly about each step of the journey.
All in all the stages we included were:
After presenting the findings, our founders saw that we’d only just scratched the surface. The company’s future rested on exploring our ‘ideal’ segment further, so it triggered a company-wide research project.
We needed to understand these Independent Stores more deeply as the segment was still too broad. It was the only way the company could commit to a direction before evolving and scaling our operations.
Affirming ourselves as ‘key players’ in the company decision-making wasn’t something I expected to be an issue in the beginning. But turns out it was one of the most difficult challenges I’ve had to face.
It helped my ability to communicate the value of Product and the processes, especially to those who might be skeptical. Plus I saw the importance of involving other team members, and the positive impact it had on their perceptions.
