Context
The digital innovation arm of the motorcycle manufacturer, TVS Motor, wanted to create a B2B2C product to shake up the automobile retail space.
From this base, we conceptualised 6 individual products across the 5 main points of the car buying journey.
This case study focuses on how I took an amorphous scope, worked with my PM to identify product opportunities, and then developed products for the different touchpoints as a designer.
Building Broad and Deep expertise of each touchpoint
To develop products across the full car buying/selling journey, we had to build knowledge of each part of the journey. To assist my team in developing this knowledge, I worn a second hat as the team’s UX researcher.
To go broad, I compiled industrial reports, conducted user interviews with business owners. To go deep, I orangised and conducted user interviews and site visits in Singapore and Indonesia, and ran a more formal 15-participant study in Singapore with car buyers. All findings were compiled into Confluence or presentation reports to upper management.
The result was a clearly identified 5-step journey across 3 user types with associated goals, activities and painpoints.
Ideating product ideas
With the journey identified, I worked with the Product team to identify parts of their journey to proceed with.
I led the ideation and design of each part of the journey, employing various techniques like Design workshops, bodystorming, and prototypes. From these ideation excercises, we identified product and touchpoint opportunities, and prototyped these ideas.
Balancing touchpoint uniqueness with unity across products
At each touchpoint, the context and user needs could change.
Consequently, I directed my team to tailor the design principles of a touchpoint's product to that product so that we optimised the experience for each touchpoint.
Visual coherence would be achieved via a common set of themes and components. This could then be tailored to each customer via whitelabelling.
Same viewport, same venue (showroom), but different parts of the customer journey. This resulted in vastly design goals and accompanying end results.
Designing backwards with Eyes on the business model
Though the team's day-to-day focus was improving the experience for salespeople and car buyers, in actuality our paying customers were dealers, who paid us for consumer data insights, and clarity of their operations.
As such, the underlying strategy of the product design was to create systems that could collect meaningful data points to be analysed.
To design this, I worked closely with our Data and Engineering teams to identify the data and data collection methods. I then had to backwards engineer how we could engage users on our products to collect the information.
Growing the product with customers
As our product gained traction with customers, we worked closely with customers in weekly calls to iterate on the product.
However, we started receiving new feature requests that pulled the product in very different directions. This disjoint caused the team to become confused by the product direction, leading to internal tension.
To resolve this, I worked with my PM to develop a new understanding of how our product could integrate and evolve with customer needs. This vision helped the team align on the product, and also aided the Sales team in their sales pitches.
Separately, I initiated discussions with our Product and Engineering teams to align how we would all work towards supporting the product vision. For the Design team, I translated the product vision into a tactical plan, and demonstrated in Figma how we could execute it.
Outcome
We went to market with 2 of the products in late 2022, garnering entreprise customers in India and Indonesia.
The most important lesson working on this product taught me was that when building an entreprise product that impacts business operations, you cannot build a product solely based on improving customer experience or staff workflows.
The most important thing is to have buy-in from businesses (and operations staff) to carry out the changes in their business practices. This makes working with the right partners crucial in creating successful transformative products.
