Marketplace in hindsight

Opportunity

Marketplace was intended as a service extension of the Loblaw brand to sell adjacent categories to food (home & living, pets, baby, toys) from third party sellers. The goal is to increase share-of-wallet and become a one-stop shop for customers.

The team envisioned Marketplace to seamlessly integrate with the Online Grocery experience. However, the task of combining the two together was more complicated than expected. With the addition of a hard deadline, this resulted in the launch of a rough user experience.

If I had the chance to do it all over again, I would have focused on the key hypotheses and only designed what is necessary to test them.

This is what I would do instead

Identify the riskiest assumption(s)

I would flush out the hypotheses by facilitating a workshop for the core team to dump all their assumptions out in the open and group them by themes.

I would then map their assumptions on a matrix comparing risks and unknown factors. Once mapped out, I would focus on the assumptions in the risky and unknown quadrant. These are the ones with the highest risks if the assumptions are wrong, thus they need to be tested. This would help us answer: what needs to be true in order to reach success?

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With the gift of hindsight, here are some of the assumptions we had:

• Customers trust the Loblaw brand, thus they are willing to buy third party items sold on our platforms.
• Customers are willing to buy groceries and non-food items (e.g. strollers, furniture, etc) together online.
• There is enough traffic going through the grocery platform that Marketplace should be able to sell despite the lack of marketing and advertising support.

After launch, it soon became apparent that simply having our products up wasn't enough. The lack of awareness became a challenge as customers didn't realize they could buy things other than groceries.

What needs to be changed and how?

I would highlight the areas that need to change in the current experience in order to test the key hypotheses.

Based on the identified areas, I would run a sketching session with the core Marketplace team to ideate on how the experience would change.

I would also use the key hypotheses as an evaluating criteria on whether we truly need to build some of the ideas from the sketching session. This will keep the project lean by only focusing on the must-haves.

Okay, but what is feasible?

Once the team is aligned on what the experience should be, I would collaborate with the development team to understand the technical limitations and adapt the designs as needed.

Learnings

Shipping = Learning. We won't truly know what does or does not work until we launch and see how customers react to our projects in the real world. We can then use this information to iterate.

Building the sleekest and most beautiful experience doesn't matter if what we're building doesn't meet our customers' needs.