Building a Product Vision and Strategy for the Mobile Channel

Published in

SSENSE-TECH

10 min readOct 22, 2019

The proliferation of smartphones has changed the prominent business model of every industry in the last decade. These powerful handheld devices democratized the internet in unprecedented ways. Not only giving rise to new business models, such as peer to peer payments, social networks, and on-demand services (Uber, Netflix, OpenTable, Spotify), but also altering the way customers interact with every brand and business around the world. It has forced the management of every company to think about the digital transformation.

Digital transformation of businesses became the hottest topic in the quarters of management consulting and corporate strategy. A search on Google trend for “Digital Transformation” shows a popularity increasing multifold in the last five years.

The wave of internet use, enabled by smartphones, added a different facet of complexity to the digital transformation. This facet further divided the digital transformation into channels — by devices — desktop, mobile, and tablet, and made it inevitable to consider channels in the product development processes. Mobile-first thinking became the most vital part of the digital transformation strategy.

Almost a year ago at SSENSE, we asked ourselves the following questions:

What does the change in customers’ preferred channel of interaction (desktop to mobile) mean to our product strategy for the mobile channel?
How should we develop a mobile channel strategy to deliver value to our customers who increasingly access SSENSE through their smartphones?

The quest to find answers to these questions took us through an insightful, exciting, and sometimes taxing journey. Now, looking back, I can reflect upon the challenges we faced, the approaches that helped us overcome those, and the mistakes that we could have avoided. Summarising these learnings, through this article, I would like to share an approach to develop a mobile product strategy in an omni-channel retail environment. The article highlights a few components specific to the luxury fashion industry, but the approach can be broadly applied to define a mobile strategy for any consumer facing business.

Developing a mobile product strategy, or for that matter any strategy, is hardly a linear process. The process can be best defined as a learning experience that requires an inquisitive mindset and structured thinking. Broadly, the process can be divided into two phases:

1. The Understanding Phase: In this phase, we adopted an outward (customer) and inward (our business and capabilities) focused research approach to understand the problem/opportunity areas in detail. The outward focused research phase emphasized better understanding our customer base, their pain points across their journey on ssense.com, and specific use cases experienced on mobile devices. The inward focused research zoomed in on our business, brand identity, and market landscape. This helped us understand our unique position, and the constraints that guided our decision making.

2. The Defining Phase: In this phase, we developed a compelling product vision and actionable strategies from the learnings and opportunities that we identified in the previous phase. The key to success in this phase relied on the adoption of the vision among all stakeholders, and building momentum through continuous value delivery.

The Understanding Phase

In this phase, the focus was to assess the various opportunities, which seemed limitless at first sight, and discover the few that our business is well-suited to pursue. In other words, we aimed to arrive at a solution that is desirable for customers, viable for business, and feasible to produce with the available resources and capabilities. Beginning with viability and feasibility seems like a faster approach, however it rarely leads to a new and innovative solution. Beginning with customers opens up the breadth of opportunities and minimizes the risk of adoption in the later stages.

Begin With Customers

Understanding our customers through the context of their mobile device interactions began with extensive research to assimilate huge amounts of information. Some of these quantitative research methods included:

Customer segment analysis based on Recency, Frequency, and Monetization (RFM)
E-commerce funnel analysis by devices (Desktop, Mobile, Tablet)
Sentiment analysis of Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys
Detailed study on acquisition, engagement, monetization, and conversion of mobile customers

The quantitative analysis helped us understand customer behavior on mobile platforms, and aroused our curiosity about the behavior of specific customers. What was missing was a human explanation of why such behavior was exhibited. The qualitative feedback from customers comes in handy to further unravel these mysteries.

SSENSE lab, an enterprise by the Product Design team, conducted multiple user research sessions. We interviewed users from various segments identified in our analysis, travelled to their cities and homes; immersing ourselves in their natural settings to shadow their shopping and discovery patterns. The motives were to understand users’ expectations from their mobile interaction, study the discovery and engagement process, and find answers to questions that we discovered through quantitative analysis. Talking to customers brought us closer to their perspective and gave a voice to the numbers that we crunched.

Interesting findings that we synthesized following these sessions include:

1. Our engaged customers view shopping beyond its transactional nature. They value engaging in an immersive and ongoing discovery of brands, designers, and products that resonate uniquely with the expression of their identity.

2. Qualitative insights into our customer segments beyond numbers — our target market is mobile savvy, informed, and discovery driven Gen-Z and millennials.

3. Customers value the distinctive SSENSE point of view in our product offering and styling. It was interesting to discover how customers leverage the SSENSE catalog as a lens into the evolving fashion landscape and then leverage this knowledge in their ongoing discovery of self-expression.

4. Mobile interactions proved to be instrumental in customers’ journeys in exploring and discovering products, brands, and fashion trends in general. The mobile channel offered remote accessibility and a tap away interaction with other favorite apps which are integral in their continued discovery.

5. The more designers that SSENSE has, the more attractive the platform is to the customers. However, with the growth of options of available designers and brands, the process to find relevant products becomes tedious and time-consuming for customers, specifically in the mobile space.

6. Customers expect an end-to-end shopping experience on their mobile devices — inspiration, discovery, engagement, and purchase — in the most mobile-optimized way.

The Internal Lens

Understanding customers helps in creating a list of pain-points and opportunities with varied intensities, but it doesn’t lay a path to create a differentiated solution. Unless you’re a monopoly, your customers are exposed to multiple options. In such a fragmented market, creating an impactful strategy necessitates consideration of what differentiates your business or brand. This is where the diverse perspective of various stakeholders can be of great value.

We took the information garnered through customer research and enriched it with the experiences and perspectives of our stakeholders. The multiple interviews with stakeholders and executives helped us view the information from their vantage point. We identified the problems that could dwindle or magnify in the future based on current business strategies and the market landscape. Big initiatives such as redefining the channel strategy warrant a high level of alignment across business units and executives. These interviews and workshops with stakeholders also allowed us to build that alignment early on and facilitate decision making in the long run.

The internal lens is all about learning the uniqueness of the company brand, culture, and business capabilities, and then envisioning how to build an opinionated product vision that creates value for customers and impact for the business. We recognized that our strong belief in a reductionist approach, the new establishment, critical thinking, and innovation should influence the value proposition of our products’ (online or offline) development, design, and go-to-market approach.

Finally, the internal lens phase is also an assessment of our current business and technological capabilities to better understand the viability and feasibility of any solution that we may envision.

The Defining Phase

A Shared Product Vision

The culmination of the understanding phase left us with a deeper understanding of the customers’ expectations and behavior in the mobile channel, and the unique strengths of our business. The stakeholders and the product team developed a common understanding that our mobile solutions should offer value beyond utilitarian design, building on the unique capabilities and experience that the mobile ecosystem offers.

One of the most difficult things one can do as a product manager is to distill the insights from the endless information and rally teams to deliver a product that customers value. The single most powerful tool in a product manager’s tool-kit is the product vision.

The product vision is a short description of the value the product aims to deliver to its customers. It is a great guiding tool for product decisions and brings everyone together on the key reasons for developing the product. However, as important as it is to develop an inspiring product vision, it is also important to get the buy-in from all the contributors and stakeholders. To achieve this shared vision, we began with multiple shared envisioning workshops, in which we assimilate the vast amount of gathered information into themes and then collectively develop a vision that we aim to achieve through the mobile channel-focused products.

Workshops, design sprint — Images from internal workshops at SSENSE

Some of the themes that stood out were:

· A personalized discovery experience that takes account of individual preferences and omni-channel interactions to show the next product or brand that users might like.

· A rich mobile experience that is built on speed, performance, efficient organization of information, and seamless navigation.

· Enhanced usability to empower discovery in a catalog which offers an abundance of choices in terms of designers, styles, and fashion trends.

The best way to deliver these experiences in the mobile channel is through an app that connects the dots from key customer interactions with SSENSE, and becomes the primary channel for engaging and retaining our core customers. With numerous discussions, ideation sessions, and wordsmith exercises, we converged on a unifying idea to create an app that offered a new, efficient, hyper-personalized app experience for users to discover the SSENSE product catalogue.

From Vision to Delivery

Through product vision, we established the value that we wanted to deliver: an efficient, hyper-personalized discovery experience. The vision is an overarching goal that can be achieved through a variety of strategies. There is no one-size fits all solution to develop these strategies. However, at its most basic, product strategy is about considering the themes of value propositions that you want to prioritize. This is the core of product management, which necessitates the prioritization of strategies that are well-aligned with business goals and deliver the sought-after value for customers.

The ethos of the SSENSE app strategy was in creating a distinctive in-app experience, capitalizing on the unique capabilities of the app ecosystem including experience-based personalization, natural and efficient navigation, and sense of immediacy. The experience should be a natural approach to discovery with a mix of serendipity and intent. Suggestions of products, brands, or promotions should be intertwined with the intuitive browsing. Delivering such experience meant that we combine our buying data, styling comprehension, customer browsing patterns, and their intent to insinuate a personalized user journey.

The in-depth research, customer interviews, and stakeholder workshops that we conducted earlier came in handy in situations when we needed to prioritize value propositions. After much deliberation, we converged to focus on:

1. Developing an in-house recommendation engine to create a spot-on personalized experience for our logged-in users.

Bringing cross-functional teams such as data scientists, machine learning engineers, and designers to develop a data-driven user experience by leveraging data generated from 13 years of browsing behavior on ssense.com product descriptions and brand affinity.
Capitalizing on data organization efforts to build values for customers.

2. A minimal yet powerful navigation system to allow users to discover the product catalog.

Reducing the design to the essentials and combining unique browsing patterns with intelligence to create a seamless path from discovery to purchase.

It is imperative to recognize that most product strategies are time-based and require continuous feedback to test their impact on defined objectives. The rigor of the understanding phase and prioritization process can increase the confidence in the product’s success only to a certain level. To help build further confidence before developing the product to its entirety, we sought early customer feedback to incorporate into the development process. The early customer feedback, obtained through user testing and beta product releases, turned out to be a fundamental factor in refining the solution before we released it to the market.

Introducing the SSENSE App

The endeavor, which we undertook a year ago has reached its first major milestone: launching our first customer-facing app on the Apple App Store. The true efficacy of the SSENSE mobile app development and recommendation teams’ attempts will be tested in the months and years to come. However, our learnings and successes thus far keep us optimistic. We anticipate the SSENSE app to become a vehicle to engage our customer base, offering an immersive, personalized, and delightful discovery experience.

In summary, I would reiterate the importance of collaboratively developing a strong and opinionated product vision early in the process, rooted in the voice of the customer and nurtured through the perspective of stakeholders.