Taking Vodafone’s IoT from untested tech to market-proven service

How we built a business model and distribution strategy for an IoT proposition driven entirely by customer needs

We helped Vodafone understand how they could move from offering singular IoT products to truly unlocking mainstream growth and leading the market. And we did it in 10 weeks.

Americo Lenza, Head of Consumer IoT Products at Vodafone Group, knew the sector had a big problem: there was no consumer need for the products that were being made. Vodafone had to take a different approach to break into the market.

At the point we started working together, Vodafone had agreed distribution deals, developed an app and even started manufacturing their own hardware, but needed help with clear insight into what their core customers might want from IoT, and how to make their existing investments profitable and scalable.

Ideation session: the team were dealt a hand of cards and had to create an IoT product as a solution. The purpose was to break away from obvious solutions.

With a lean core team of 4 Albionites, 3 research consultants from Decidedly, and 2 Vodafoners, our approach was to identify a specific target audience, who are a strategic priority for the business. We kept the customer at the heart, incorporating customer development interviews and innovative in-home ethnographic research techniques, spending time with the target audience in their daily lives to observe problems that didn’t have solutions, but that IoT technology could potentially solve. Our research showed those problems are surprisingly small — not on the earth shattering scale where the IoT category has focussed to date.

We ran a series of two-week product design sprints, allowing us to design, prototype, test, and refine at speed. The solution was a set of services that brings together different IoT devices to make everyday life a little easier and more comfortable — and it’s these services, not the hardware, that people bought into. We also considered how the services could be advertised, discovered, configured, purchased, priced and delivered.

Testing proved successful with customers across Europe claiming the top reason for their sign up was because the services “made life easier.” Vodafone is now busy working on the technical build to bring these services to market.