eCommerce Opportunities

1848 has been exploring the eCommerce space to identify opportunities to support small businesses with digital storefronts. The team has defined two top-level opportunity spaces that they wish to explore further: Crack the Marketing Code & Know Exactly What I'm Selling. 1848 is looking for a partner to work with them to build upon their current knowledge of the discrete opportunities within these opportunity spaces and ultimately make significant progress towards a candidate product concept.

1848 Ventures has spent time understanding the opportunity spaces and needs of eCommerce merchants with their own digital storefront and would like to continue to explore the following

Crack the Marketing Code

When I'm considering putting more money into advertising, help me confidently/quickly/safely experiment to improve conversion rate so I can turn '$20,000 in ad spend on Facebook into $40,000 in sales."

Know exactly what I'm selling

Help me choose the tactics and strategies best suited for the type of product that I'm selling.

Primary and secondary research have led to these two opportunity spaces and can be leveraged as a starting point for the project.

Balance will make effort to align with standards developed within 1848 Ventures. Standards might be templates for how concepts are communicated, etc.

The team will focus on one opportunity space at a time. The work dedicated to the first opportunity space will be completed prior to kicking off work on the second opportunity space.

Identify discrete opportunities to deliver value in each of the two opportunity spaces. These deeper level opportunities are distilled into a prioritized list of benefits that feed conceptual feature ideation and design.

Refine and validate customer and job performer profiles.

Define the Experience Strategy of candidate-fidelity concept(s). An Experience Strategy defines the vision, benefits, principles, and constraints that guide the design and development of refined, candidate-fidelity concepts.

The Balance and 1848 teams will take an iterative approach to reach the goals and objectives of this project. The team will leverage and augment previous research and strategy to iteratively define, design, and validate sacrificial concepts with potential end-users of the product. This approach will help the team better understand the unmet and underserved needs of job performers (users of the solution) and customers (buyers of the solution)*. At the end of the project, 1848 will have Experience Strategy documentation to use as a tool to aid the design and development of a candidate-quality concept for each opportunity space.

Balance strongly recommends focusing on one opportunity space at a time.

*it is unclear if these are the same people at this point.

An Experience Strategy (documentation/tool) for the candidate-quality concepts. This includes a draft description of the candidate concept to be further refined in subsequent projects. The description of the candidate concept will communicate a strategy to develop an alpha product for additional, higher-fidelity, experimentation in subsequent projects..

Refined customer and job performer profiles.

Kickoff and Scoping (workshop)

Deconstruct the proposed concept to better understand the intricacies of the idea and how it came to be.

Deconstruct the jobs to be done that informed the development of the opportunities spaces. This will help the team define the avenues ripe for additional exploration into the space, including the job performers we will want to talk to.

Explore

Secondary Research

The team will explore the current experiences of the job performers and the jobs to be done identified in previous research and in the scoping workshop. This initial exploration focuses on secondary sources of information and helps the team develop hypotheses and clarifications to aid in the definition of the sacrificial concepts.

For example, we might conduct additional secondary research to better understand the challenges related to tracking across sites (CTMC) or what situations or products fall under 'search' or 'experience' umbrellas.

Primary Research

Additional primary research to augment previous work.

Synthesize

The team will synthesize previous research findings and secondary research to create theories on the benefits, constraints, principles, and features to guide the development of sacrificial concepts.

Design

Design and describe sacrificial low-fidelity concepts to use as stimuli in evaluation interviews.

Evaluate

The team will present sacrificial concepts to potential customers (job performers) to gather feedback critical to perfecting, killing, or pivoting the idea (solution).

At the conclusion of all evaluation interviews, a Kano Model questionnaire will be completed by the participant with the help of the facilitator. This special type of questionnaire is an extremely useful tool to prioritize the features and benefits of the solution.

Refine

The team will analyze and synthesize feedback to refine the concepts.

Final Synthesis

Synthesize evaluative research findings into tools that will guide the design and development of candidate-quality concepts.

This documentation is the Experience Strategy. It communicates the solution vision, experience constraints and principles, features, and benefits. It provides a clear roadmap for the design and development of the solution.

Kano Model questionnaire in the interviews. The concepts are presented to the participant to get feedback. The participant is then asked to go through the Kano questionnaire to understand how to categorize the feature.

End Goal

3-5 Candidate Concepts

Executions on the Experience Strategy

Evaluate

Make recommendations on next steps

Process

Phase 1: Strategy

Foundational Understanding

Previous work

Secondary Research

Domain Knowledge

Lean Product Exploration

Sacrificial Concept development

IDI's

Jobs Interview

Kano Model Survey

Features and/or benefits

Fill out in-person

Sacrificial Concept Resonance Evaluation

Experience Strategy Development

Principles

Creative Constraints

by broadly defined feature

Benefits priorization

Phase 2: Concept Refinement

Candidate Concept Development

Candidate Concept Evaluation

IDI's

Kano Model Survey

Evaluation of Exp Strategy features and/or benefits

This will allow us to see whether the concept execution is mismatched with the perceived value of the features.

Fill-out in person

Candidate Concept Resonance Evaluation