Deep Dive into leveraging buyer data with a Custom Design Sprint
Due to compelling insights from the data team, the internal tools team was asked to create new roadmap items to help our gallery partners see what customers were interested in buying & give them tools to react. I ran a design sprint to create 4 validated projects to add to our backlog in just 1 week.
COMPANY
Artsy
timeline
Q1, 2023
MY ROLE
IC Senior Product Designer
problem
We needed to understand the data insights & add projects to our roadmap related to helping gallerists understand what artworks to upload as fast as possible.
solution
A week-long design sprint with the entire internal tools team to understand the insights & create validated projects to begin immediately.
impact
After 5 days, we created 4 new roadmap items for our backlog, each with clear hypotheses to test.
The Process
Over the course of a few weeks, I designed 5 days worth of workshops with instructions for participation by Product Mangers, Engineers, Data Analysts, & VP stakeholders. The agenda looked like this:
Day 1:
Mapping The Problem
Learn & Define
I began the week with a deep dive into the data & user research we (myself, the user research lead & data analyst) had collected to help everyone understand as much about the problem space as possible. Then, the PM & I put together a panel of 4 Account Executives to answer questions & fill in the gaps in real time. At the end of the day, I consolidated key insights & problem questions to review on day 2.
Day 1 takeaways
User Research
• Partners were frequently requesting to see data about customer actions on the site (ex. Searches, follows, saves, etc.).
• Some Partners didn’t upload all of their inventory because they didn't have confidence it would sell.
• Partners asked for insights into artwork listing performance from collectors.
Q&A with AEs
• Partners requested the ability to duplicate their artwork listings often.
• Partners lost confidence in uploading more of their inventory if the inventory already on the platform wasn’t selling.
• AEs sent reports of artist & artwork trends manually. Partners asked what artworks are trending based on user activity.
Problem Questions
• How could we surface user data to our Partners within the product to encourage them to react to the saved alerts?
• How could we give them confidence that the artworks they were uploading were the ones that collectors were looking for?
Day 2:
Generate Ideas - Sketch & Ideate
Brainstorming solutions. Started with 2 workshops to refine the problem space, Ideal Outcome & How Might We (HMW) statements, and ended with a solution ideation quick 8 sketching session.
Ideal Outcome Workshop
In this exercise we ideated on outcomes rather than outputs. We came up with options for how to complete the sentence “in a perfect world, where Artsy helps Partners know what artworks to list…”
Ideal outcome 1
“...Partners know when there is demand for their artists or works and can list them, so they never miss a sale opportunity.”
Ideal outcome 2
“...Partners see the value of their Artsy subscription due to the valuable trend report information and stay on the platform (do not churn).”
HMW Statements
In this activity, we focused on reframing our company KR of “Partners upload works that fulfill 50% of collectors signals within 30 days of the alert creation”. The top voted HMW statements were...
HMW Statement 1
“How might we make partners aware that there is interest on Artsy for the artist they represent.”
HMW Statement 2
“How might we make it easier for partners to upload as many works by an in demand artist they have as quickly and simply as possible.”
Quick 8 sketching
Now that we had our top ideal outcomes and HMW statements, we brainstormed solution ideas in a fast–paced sketch session. Everyone sketched 4 ideas and narrowed down to their top 2-3 ideas each & prepared to present to a group of stakeholders on day 3.
Day 3:
Decide - Vote & Prioritize
Voted on ideas & expanded on them further. Voted on the top 5 ideas with input from stakeholders, then expanded on the ideas with the beetle exercise & uncertainty mapping. Ended the day by prioritizing the list and assigning tasks for everyone to work on during Day 4.
Voting with external stakeholders
I brought in the Director of Engineering, the Director of Product Management, and the Director of Product Design to help us vote on our solutions. We ended with 5 top voted ideas:
• Activity feed showing saved alerts data,
• A new Trend Page,
• Partners receive real-time alerts,
• Templates for artwork listings,
• Show collector activity data in internal seller tools.
Expanding ideas with the beetle & uncertainty mapping
We separated into 5 teams to push each solution idea further by answering a handful of probing questions (the beetle exercise) & plotting open questions on an impact vs. uncertainty matrix. This workshop helped us refine each solution & consider other options
Day 3 Prioritization Matrix Highlights
I asked the PM to host a prioritization matrix exercise with the team and we worked together to refine & prioritize the list of validated project ideas to a top 4:
1
duplicate
...on Artwork list page (high impact, medium effort)
2
search
...on Artwork list page (medium-high impact, medium effort)
3
alerts
...on internal tools home (high impact, medium-high effort)
4
Trend Report Tab
...in the internal seller tools (high impact, high effort)
Day 4:
Refine - Design & Investigate
Reviewed assignments from Day 3 and broke into small groups to work on investigations, deeper project definition, and design work. Each group also put together presentations for Day 5.
Engineer Work Highlights
• A group took on understanding how the back-end of the buyer data functionality worked & the opportunities we had for surfacing that information to our Partners.
• Another group researched an old trend report email to understand how it was generated and what the opportunities were to automate trend information.
• A third group investigated the idea of creating templates in our artwork listing form. I assisted this group with competitor analysis and we pivoted to focusing on understanding the back-end capabilities for searching & duplicating artwork listings.
PM & PD Work Highlights
• PM worked on creating briefs for the top 4 voted projects.
• We synced with another PM to gain insights on an existing artist trend information feature, to see if we could use it for our Partners.
• We deep dived into existing buyer data signals to include in an MVP of a trend report tab.
• I assisted 1 of the engineer groups and created a wireframe for the trend report project & a prototype for the save + duplicate an artwork listing flow.
Day 5:
Finalize - Review, Align & Celebrate
On our final day together we presented the work that was done on day 4, & aligned on next steps for each project.
Final Day
By Friday, we had put 4 new projects in our project backlog that we all had high confidence in as a team. The 4 Projects that came out of the design sprint were
• Duplicate feature
• Search + Duplicate flow
• Surface Collector demand signals in Internal tools
• Surface Saved Alerts data in internal tools
Learnings & Takeaways
While a design sprint is not a new idea, what was unique about this experience is that the participants were mostly engineers. I learned a lot about the advantages & opportunities of running a design sprint like this. Here are a few of my takeaways:
Advantages
On days 3-5 when the team was tasked with taking the ideas and exploring how feasible they were, there was a lot of engagement. The engineers deep-dived into the code, asked really interesting questions & pushed the possibilities of each idea to reality. This speed was crucial to achieving our goal of adding real roadmap items to our backlog in such a short timeline.
Opportunities
The first few days were information heavy & I could have spent more time explaining how to turn insights into problem statements. Next time, I will work ahead of time to define the user problems & business problems. I would then spend more time demonstrating how to turn these into focused solutions before asking the group to sketch.
Outcome
+4↑
Validated Projects
# of projects added to the backlog in just 1 week.
+100%↑
Alignment
All participants left inspired and ready to tackle the projects we had developed together.
All-in-all this was a huge win for team bonding and understanding of a new and complex problem space in a short amount of time. We had 4 solid & potentially revenue generating projects started & planned by the end of the week and I received a lot of positive feedback from the team about how fun it was to have high alignment & create real solutions for our users together.
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