Project Overview
During my time at BBTV as Product Owner, I led the vision and development of this project where I discovered features that needed to be prioritized and opportunities for our team to focus on and invest resources into.
Tools
Shopify, AdobeXD, Asana
Tags
eCommerce, User Research, Product Management
Timeline
In Progress
INTRODUCTION
Project Context
During my most recent position at BBTV, I got the opportunity to learn and lead through the product lifecycle of an innovative and new eCommerce platform including — product vision and strategy, customer requirements, roadmap and SOW development, leading the UI/UX and development teams, feature prioritizing and stakeholder management.
I was tasked to lay down the foundation for an innovative eCommerce platform to service influencers and creators as it aligned with larger scale business initiatives.
My work is under an NDA, so this case study will be a high level overview of what I did and my key learnings.
WHAT I DID
My Role
At BBTV, I was given the oppourtunity to champion this eCommerce platform. My work is under an NDA, but some of the work I did was:
- Led discussions with leadership for vision development with user research
- Create a full SOW and negotiated with developers for timeline, cost, features etc.
- Identify a key features to implement and prioritize
- Lead the UI/UX and development teams (2 teams, 6 people)
The Impact
Soft launch is scheduled for the end of this year while the go to market strategy is currently being developed.
This service design work is projected to increase value add utility from creators and provide an alternative revenue stream significatnly increasing the versitility of offerings provided by the eCommerce department.
Challenges
Wide Scope & Clouded Vision
It required substancial research to fully map out the business case we were building the prodcut for and it resulted in a prelimiary vision that was trying to solve too many probelms and lacked specificity.
Balancing Priorities
As any typical product project, everything is important and everything needs to be done, so I had to think of creative measures to highlight priority and feature prioritization in the development to get all stakeholders on board.
Flexibility in a Tumultuous Market
The creator and entertainment space is fluculating causing constantly redefining of product landscape and re-evaluating completitors squeezing into target market territory we were trying to enter. This required an agile mindset and thorough understanding of where our product fit into the already crowded space.
GATHERING CONTEXT
Research
I started by speaking with stakeholders and all involved parties who were part of the high level development of the project. By gathering context, it helped me understand the needs, wants and goals of the product and identify the problem space better before diving into further.
Competitors
Key Creator Insights
OUTLINING THE JOBS-TO-BE-DONE
Creating the Scope of Work (SOW)
From my research, I broke down the project and its complexities — the vision, core functionality, deadlines, resource allocations including any edge cases and redundancies.
I created a foundational document that consciely and accurately outline the scope, goals, objectives and deliverables of the project. In addition, I created an internal baseline documentation to ensure alignment on product vision and goals.
Decision Workshops
An idea was brought up via leadership on a shift in direction in some aspects of the product that compromised previously outlined goals an objectives. I held a decision workshop with all major stakeholders to determine priorities and what possible implementations of this new direction would look like and what aspects may be compromised as a result.
At that point, we had completed previous workshops on priorities, naming/branding themes, and user flow. This workshops’ goal was to determine if gamification is a valid way to add interest and dynamics to our site and engage our primary customer segment. Opinions on the team were split about wanting to introduce more dynamic and interesting components to the project based on some user feedback. Prior to the workshop I prepped the below matrix and we filled it out as a team to establish what gamification would be appropriate to integrate into the project.
Note: some cells were removed due to non-disclosure. This was the summarization visualization provided after the workshop.
Buy In
The decision workshop was successful in determining our priorities and ensuring a unified vision for the product going forward. I collected all the feedback and presented the findings to the rest of the teams.
With the scope and goals defined (and redefined), I was able to move forward with development. During this time I also set the success metrics for this project for pre and post development.
DEVELOPMENT
Implementing the Quick Wins
As development occurs, not all of the changes are front end and applicable to the stakeholders.
I ensured in my original SOW and throughout the iterative process, that implementation of elements stakeholders could see were completed regularly to ensure visibility in the progress of the project. I reprioritized features and development as necessary to keep on track but also give reportable, tangible updates.
Synthesis and Prioritizing Themes
I synthezied updates regularly and presented them to leadership and took any feedback back to the UI/UX and developer team to flush out further.
I prioritized feedback with the MoSCow and Rice methods of prioritization to ensure appropriate pain points were being addressed first looking at impact, time, risk etc.
Solutioning and Executing the Vision
I explored several different solutions and flows before coming up with a proposal for the future vision. I wireframed the UI for this ideal flow and iterated on it based on feedback from users and stakeholders.
Balancing the technical requirements and timelines, I made set the direction on what an MVP would look like. Since I understood how the platform worked through my research and SOW development, I also laid out the relevant teams interactions and flow
There were many tradeoffs I had to make during development due to things taking longer than anticipated in development - or things just not turning out as expected, I ensured with every deviation that I laid out the potential risks associated with my decisions to be further iterated on.
TESTING, QA & SECURITY
What Do We Want To Accomplish?
I developed and led the initial beta testing of about 35 internal participants (a combination of virtual and in person testing) creating the instruction set, guided questioning and setting up the beta environment for them to test.The purpose of the first phase of testing was to gather data on user behaviour, brand opinion, usability, and identify issues and bugs.
For the virtual testing, we included an outline of how to set up the environment. Below is some of the categories of questions we asked:
- Demographic information
- CeCommerce background info like buying behaviour, typical site interactions etc.
- We then went into usability and task based questions asking participants to complete a task (for in person I was able to time the task completion)
- Exploratory and open ended questions on brand opinion, what they thought the goals of the site were etc. The next section was scaling opinions with questions based on opinion like ease of use, enjoyability, confinedece using the site etc.
Through each section it offered participants an opportunity to report any bugs or errors they might be encountering.
Analysis
I looked at patterns both with the entire set of data and also broke the data into the different user segments based on their buying behaviour/eCommerce habits data since these different segments will have different job-to-be-done and we want to capture those in our analysis. I look at trends and consolidate the data into general themes before presenting the feedback to the team.
After each phase of testing, I visualized the data into the categories of what we wanted to accomplish in terms of brand opinions, user behaviour on the site and usability. We had some feedback on branding that led us to engage in an additional brainstorm as there were various opinions and approaches to fix some of the concerns our testers brought up.
Security Review
Coordination between our internal IT and external developers required clear and consise communication on security requirements for the project. Outlining infustrutcure diagrams, load outlines and changing servers were part of my job to coordinate and assist in execution.
NEXT STEPS
Go To Market Strategy
Currently undergoing internal changes but will shortly resume GTM strategy with Marketing and Branding teams.
FINAL WORDS
Learnings
Throughout this experience, I got to wear many different hats and learn about a product from all angles — vision development, research methods, approval, scoping out problems, delivering a SOW, testing, security, and more.
It was an interesting business case to solve that lent itself to a crowded competitor space, so I had to learn how to consolidate a lot of information and ideas into an actionable solution. It allowed me to lay out all the groundwork but also see a product through the development, testing and GTM stages.
Thanks for Reading 💛
If you’d like to hear more about my experience, feel free to send me an email–I’d love to chat ☕.
My Other Projects
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