Shipping a major new product

Introduction

My role during this project was IC Product Designer, embedded in the "Business" product team and working in close collaboration with the Product Manager and Engineering Manager at Sidekicker.

The opportunity to take a major new product from idea to reality doesn’t come around that often for a designer. It’s an exciting thing to take on, but it’s also often a test of a designer’s product thinking. Their ability to find the balance between a rigorous, ideal design process and the need to ship something fast. The only way to approach this sort of problem is to constantly be prioritising everything you do.

Problem

Sidekicker is a two-sided temp staffing marketplace. It’s not uncommon for large businesses who outsource their temporary staff to engage multiple staffing agencies like Sidekicker. They do this because a single agency might not be able to supply the full range of roles they require or the numbers they require. For many of these businesses, managing these agencies is a manual process. They need to submit multiple requests for staff to each agency, manage back and forth communication (often phone calls), keep track of who is going to turn up, who’s been withdrawn, compliance of those turning up, and plenty more. And that’s all before the job even starts.

"We have no visibility at the moment ... we are constantly digging through emails" - Business user

Sidekicker saw a clear opportunity here to become the central platform to manage all of this. To properly test the hypothesis though, beyond expressions of interest from our customers, we needed to actually ship an MVP.

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Problem: businesses using multiple staffing agencies struggle with communication and visibility

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Proposed solution: the "Multi-Agency Platform" (MAP) provides a centralised home for managing multiple staffing agencies

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Success metrics

Our success metrics for the MVP was the adoption of the product by our trial customer as well as their sustained usage over time. Beyond the MVP we would be looking to increase adoption of the new product in collaboration with our sales and marketing teams.

Process

Obligatory disclaimer: the actual process was of course not as neat and linear as below

Discovery

The discovery stage was focused on three high-level objectives:

1. To gain more confidence that we were solving the right problem
2. To understand the current state for our target customers
3. To understand what a possible solution might look like

We had the benefit of finding a design partner in one of our customers who had expressed interest in the product. They would be the first business to trial it and they had agreed to give us access to their staff to conduct research. We also found one other target business willing to talk to us.

B2B research participants aren’t the easiest to get a hold of at the best of times, and the limited number of businesses that met our target profile increased that challenge significantly. So as a proxy for talking with more businesses, we interviewed our internal account managers who handled accounts that matched the profile.

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Me moderating a user interview with one of our target customers.

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Key insight #1: communication is critical

"There are at least a dozen emails after the initial request before it's filled" - Business user

One of the insights we uncovered during this discovery stage was that even after centralising some of the core processes, off-platform communication was still going to be a significant factor in the success of the product. There would be many instances where the business or agency would need to communicate via email.

Given this sort of decentralised communication was a major part of the problem (no transparency, time consuming, etc.), we eventually wanted to bring this communication into the platform. In the meantime though, we needed an MVP solution. I landed on a simple solution of presenting visible business/agency contact information so that it was available if and when it was needed.

Key insight #2: our users are on the move

"It's on my phone, it's email that I reply back to, I'm not going and logging back into my laptop" - Business user

Another key insight was that our target users were often on the move. They might be a supervisor who spends most of their time on the floor of a warehouse, or a registered nurse who is constantly moving between patients.

In the future, there is a lot of opportunity to optimise for this, from providing an optimised mobile experience, to building out a companion mobile app that provides native benefits like push notifications. For the MVP though, the clear action was simply to ensure the product was mobile friendly. I followed best-practice responsive design principles, aiming for the best possible mobile experience while respecting the tight time constraints we were working to.

Design

The preliminary research, combined with some competitor analysis, gave me the inputs I needed to create some initial concepts.

One of the biggest challenges at this point was working out how to deliver such a large product in the leanest possible way. What we didn’t want to do was spend a bunch of time deeply integrating what was essentially a gamble, into our core platform. We made the decision to keep it functionally disconnected, but make it feel integrated in the user experience through some simple but effective design choices.

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Prototypes communicating some of the early concepts.

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We got feedback and ultimately buy-in from senior stakeholders in the business and then took the chosen concept back to the original research participants. We quickly learned what was working and what wasn’t.

Key insight #3: the MVP was on-track

“I can’t believe this idea hasn’t been thought of before.” - Business user

The response from our users was generally very positive. They could see clearly how much time the solution would save them, even in its MVP form.

Key insight #4: there was room to simplify

“I don’t really care if it’s been accepted, I just want the workers.” - Business user

A particular feature in our final concept did receive some negative feedback from users. The feature asked the agency responding to a request for staff to either accept or reject the request, and that response was then sent to the business to let them know that the agency was or wasn’t working on it.

The users we interviewed saw that status update as noise - an unnecessary feature and email that wouldn’t help them. So we happily reduced the complexity of the solution by removing it.

Delivery

With the MVP concept found, the next step was to turn it into high-fidelity production designs.

When you need to produce a lot of designs in a short amount of time, a great principle to follow is: reduce, reuse, recycle.

I worked with Product and Engineering to reduce wherever we could by simplifying logic and moving non-essential functionality to future releases. I reused as much as possible, taking full advantage of our design system, Mari. And finally I recycled existing design patterns, page templates and custom components. This all also helped to make this new product feel like it was an integrated part of the broader Sidekicker experience.

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I reused as much as possible by taking full advantage of our design system, Mari.

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Results

Key result #1: released on time!

The first key result of this initiative is that we delivered on time! Through ruthless prioritisation and an absolute focus on delivering the most minimal of MVPs, we got this monster of a project into production on schedule.

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Internal Slack message announcing the launch of the product.

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Key result #2: adoption by trial customer

Upon launch we surveyed the trial business to understand how the product was performing. We identified a few high-priority issues that we quickly resolved, and created a backlog for the remainder. Despite these issues, the product was received really positively.

Within a few months, the customer was confident enough in the solution to want to expand the product from their initial 6 trial sites, to all 149 of their sites around Australia!

Key result #3: sustained usage

After an initial adoption phase, this particular trail customer has continued to use the product consistently over time. The below chart clearly shows this sustained volume.

Chart showing workers requested by the trial customer over time. The chart show the number of requests has been consistent over time.

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Lesson

Reducing, reusing, and recycling can be a hard thing to do as a designer, especially when the things your reducing feel so important or when you can see clear flaws in the things you’re recycling. But if these things don’t line up with the objectives of the project, product or business, it’s time to let it go (♫ cue Frozen theme song ♫).

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_{Hero image by Iván Díaz on Unsplash}