Challenges
Braincorp was 6 months behind in production of their delivery of their customer portal. A majority of their time was spent stabilizing the OS that was embedded on the robots. With their backs against the wall, they engaged with Seamgen with a mission to quickly set up a customer portal with a limited feature set to hit their delivery date. With no access to their customers, and little to no documentation, the knowledge transfer needed to come from the product owner. With a short window for delivery, I was forced to rely on information and assumptions from the product manager which forced me to make assumptions and design with empathy for the main user types.
Approach
Seamgen was under pressure to not only define the product quickly but, get our development team started with foundational development tasks. With full trust from the Braincorp team the Product Manager and I worked quickly to make decisions so that we could meet release dates. I needed to be creative with my approach so I outlined a high level strategy. Quickly understand their user archetypes and most immediate needs by embedding myself with the product owner to document and collect as much information as a I could. Create a prioritized feature list that outlined everything needed for the MVP based on the information we had. Facilitate ideation exercises to define feature concepts and potential workflows. Update the feature list and use it as a living document and the single source of truth. Get development started quickly by defining core views and repeated components.
Outcome
By using the feature list as a living document, I was able to hold the product owner accountable while also using it as the source of truth for feature definition and any changes. This also allowed me to control the scope by checking in with our project manager & development team with any changes or additional functionality. This lead to a very diplomatic environment between the Braincorp and Seamgen teams and even with short timelines the project ran smoothly. By leveraging Zeplin and establishing a component library early, development was able to work quickly and build views without fully defined requirements. This was not our ideal process but we were able to deliver the MVP for the client on-time and on-budget.
Discovery
Being that Braincorp was behind schedule in delivering their customer facing portal, I worked to quickly understand their business and technology offerings.
Ideation
Because their customers were interested in the data, we dove right into reporting concepts that could provide immediate value to their users. Without access to their users we had to make assumptions about what data was valuable and how to present it.
Component Library
Using the Zeplin app, we were able to quickly catalog components to kick-start development and allow them to work efficiently.
Reporting Concepts
With no time to validate ideas and pressure coming from their executive team and their customers, we needed to get development started. We went with a strategy to design in high fidelity as a way to keep their biggest client (Walmart) excited about the next release of the customer portal.
