Product ecosystem for Freelancers

Context

In Russia there is potential customer’s segment that is significantly increased in last 2-3 years. The whole infrastructure for these people in all business segments is not developed for this group of customers. First of all it is related to the regulatory reasons – more than 80% of self-employed are not registered. Even if they are, business does not have special conditions for them – B2C can not satisfy needs of this group, B2B does not consider them as a B2B. The whole field is green.

The brief

To create the tariff plan with internal and external product set (telecommunications, internet, other services like cloud storage) that meets their needs.

The concern

Many unknowns in the area of which professions belong to this segment,  how do they work. 

Planning

For the whole discovery process we have chosen card sorting and design thinking methods.

Hypothesis

Freelancers use more services that being offered in B2B business in the company, so, they use external providers to fulfill the need.

Discovery Team

Product owner – responsible for managing product, business analytics and translation business to tech

UX Manager – Me, who is responsible for all research activities, idea validations, usability testing and customer journeys and mock ups

Metrics

Customers who qualified as Freelances buy more MegaFon products

Research

Challenge

The idea to create services was offered to the company by Consultants, attracting the attention, that in B2C business current services set-up is not enough.

We thought how we could get there and get in contact to these people.

Getting in contact

As long as in this category falls completely diverse professions, we started our search via corporate abilities, friends and friends of friends and social network search.

Categories: instagram and youtube bloggers, sellers in the area of C2C (who produces and sells or re-sells certain things, including handmade), course teachers and people who do small services (like, do accounting report as an outsource).

Research method

We did not know what exactly we want to build, company had no vision towards the product, that’s why we decided to go for Design Thinking approach – to get to know the basics, create solution, refine as much as we need and for the final vision and direction of the whole product.

Is a powerful tool to explore potential concept and make the whole product development team work together. And it is simply fun to do!  

Emphathise

We decided to apply two methods on this step: interview and open card sorting. Interview to understand the users, their pain points and how do they solve them.

Open card sorting for collecting the list of services freelancers use for their everyday business life.

We interviewed 12 potential users: 4 from internet sphere and microblogging, 2 hand-made stuff sellers, 5 of those who sell their services (language courses, trainings, etc), 1 small business owner

Define

On second day of design thinking session we were discussing takeaways.

Interview takeaways

Our assumption that all of them are not registered as a business was wrong. Bloggers and internet workers (including producers) already have registered officially their companies, but still, B2B segment can not provide them services they need, because they are super expensive and take into account primary big clients, B2C segment services are also do not fit to their needs, because limits of the services are too small (Gb of internet, or cloud storage, etc).

As well, we identified, that to this category fall not only business-of-one companies, but also small companies around 2-5 people – no B2B service provider takes them seriously.

Card sorting takeaways

We had a list of services, that our target audience user for their everyday business

Later this day we while business owners were looking which of the services does Company have and if we have contractual relationships with needed service providers

Ideate

After analysis all of the opportunities we came up with the approach of basic tariff, services you can upgrade your tariff plan with and access to professional services that are not needed for everyone.

To design the approach and decide which services do we consider as basic, optional and professional we used information from the interview.

Prototyping

We started with defining use cases and exploring the borders between B2B and B2C entry points to the product and millions of "What if?". REALLY A LOT.
Afterwards we started to prepare happy path customer journeys for testing.

We took 2 scenarios: upgrade with antivirus and access to business environment.

Testing

We tested paper prototype - we printed out all the sms with links customer will receive, printed out entry points (pages with the set of services) and welcome pages  

Final solution was a tariff-plan that user can build up by himself like LEGO, that consist of regular B2C features, as long as certain B2B. 

User testing was successful, so by senior management was made a decision to proceed with the solution that was tested with users as a deliverable of design thinking.