Startup with multiple rounds of investment.

Developing the MVP of a B2B marketplace for photographers

#Design research #MVP #Customer journey mapping #Co-creation workshops #Product strategy

The one sentence summary.

Devising an MVP in collaboration with founders based on customer discovery at a B2B photography startup subsequently becoming a market leader in two markets

The longer summary.

  • The client, a startup in the photographer marketplace, aimed to enhance their B2B revenue stream by developing a tailored platform for companies seeking photographers. They needed to identify an MVP of their solution that balances their rapid growth goals and budget and time constraints.

    • Conducted 6-6 interviews with B2B customers and photographers to gather insights.

    • Facilitated workshops with the client to understand critical challenges and opportunities.

    • Analyzed competition and marketplace dynamics to inform strategic decisions.

    • Collaborated in two-day workshops to map customer journeys, develop personas, and prioritize growth strategies.

    • Interviews: Extracted key insights from B2B customers and photographers.

    • Workshops: Engaged in collaborative sessions to define challenges and opportunities.

    • Competition Analysis: Examined enterprise and marketplace solutions for strategic positioning.

    • Persona development: Created personas for the photographers who will use the platform.

    • Customer Journey Mapping: Built a customer journey for both sides of the platform.

    • Product prioritisation through impact-effort scoring: Streamlined decision-making through facilitated exercises with founders.

    • Identified critical insights such as the importance of references and administrative support for photographers.

    • Crafted a comprehensive MVP concept covering customer journeys, personas, and growth strategies.

    • Enabled the client to initiate product development promptly with clear insights and direction.

  • 1) The more time put in upfront, the less time wasted later. While we knew that financial constraints were critical for the client, we did not manage to scope this upon project kick-off well enough. We also failed to do a deep enough immersion into the client’s existing understanding of their customers. Better upfront familiarity with both would have meant better scope management and easier stakeholder alignment.

    2) Pilot new methods, especially when some tech is involved. We used a unique approach to make impact-effort evaluation more evidenced by taking inspiration from the Benny Hill sorting method. As the session where we used it was run online with the client, we had to set up the workspace in Miro which proved insufficient for efficiently running an exercise like this.

Developing a two-sided customer journey for the platform

We developed a two-sided journey map jointly with the client at a workshop, considering key insights, needs, pains, Jobs-To-Be-Dones and hero moments for both the photographer and the B2B customer side of the platform.

Understanding positioning with a platform growth-feature matrix

We recognised that most platform businesses can be mapped onto a 2x2 matrix based on two factors. First, whether they facilitate extensive growth (growth through more customers) or intensive growth (growth through higher productivity), and second, whether their key value added is helping sales or helping project management. We used insights from the client's industry and the interviews conducted to start arranging the key needs and customer jobs into these segments.

Mapping features onto customer journey stages

Using the jobs-to-be-done's and the needs, we ran an ideation session to generate potential features categorised by customer journey stages. We tracked which side of the platform a feature services, what insight source an idea came from and the technological capability required using colour tags.

Prioritisation results after online, modified 'Benny Hill sorting'

Finally, we organised an (online) internal impact-effort scoring session with the client. Slightly modifying the 'Benny Hill sorting' method, both agency and client-side participants were randomly assigned a range of ideas which they had to score on importance and urgency. The aggregated scores gave a steer on product prioritisation for the MVP.

Client workshop focusing on persona development, int
erview insight mining, and ideation