Expanding our Serviceable Market
During our 2022 Kick-Off event, PickTrace set out several business goals that would require the product team to create “bets” on how best to achieve those goals.
One of the most critical goals for the organization was to expand our Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) to $11.5M.
Because our product served certain crop types and not others, the business was missing out on a large percentage of potential customers within a massive market of grow operations.
Why Field Pack?
- All remaining unsupported crops in the Western US with revenue opportunities >$500K are field packed
- Our field pack work provides PickTrace with the capabilities to expand SAM by 160,000 acres ($6.7M in potential revenue)
What are we focusing on and why?
- Of the field packed crops, there is high process standardization within table grapes and strawberries (which makes a solution easier design and build under seasonal constraints)
- We can unlock support for 90 to 100% of each crop [table grapes and strawberries] by solving for their respective processes
Quick glossary
- Pack Styles – different types of consumer packaging based on retail orders
- Piece Rates – the rate or value each piece of production is worth to the worker
- Tiered Piece Rates – rates set based on production performance, the more pieces produced, the higher the rate paid to the worker/team
- Label Roll – in a field pack operation, every small team gets assigned a unique roll of labels which are pre-scanned and assigned to that team so each unit they produce is accurately credited to that team
The team
Product Manager
Greg Moore
Field Implementation
Ella Brewer
Me
Design Lead
Narmada Subramanian
Design Support
Petey Light
Engineering
Kevin Plaut
QA
In a lead designer capacity, I led the discovery and definition phases, which involved research planning, conducting field studies, and analyzing worker tasks through detailed process diagrams. I collaborated with stakeholders, maintained regular check-ins, and conducted competitive analyses to evaluate industry standards. My work included synthesizing insights from these activities to inform design decisions. During the ideation and experimentation phase, I facilitated “Design Jams” or design sprints, mapped out features, and paired with developers to plan and execute deliverables, ensuring that the solutions we developed were innovative and user-focused.
In support, I contributed to solution articulation by assisting with user stories and story mapping, ensuring clarity in defining user needs and product goals. I played an active part in developing wireframes and flows, helping to visualize and structure design concepts. During the prototyping phase, I collaborated closely on creating interactive prototypes and high-fidelity designs to bring our concepts to life, ensuring they aligned with business objectives.
In the testing and validation phase, I supported prototype testing, facilitating feedback loops to gather insights and ensure the designs met user expectations. I also played a key role in planning iterations for delivery, educating cross-functional teams like customer support and implementation (CS/IM) to ensure smooth handoffs and alignment as we progressed through the development cycle.
Muddy boots
Along with product, the design team spent a considerable amount of time engaging with our customers. While product managers were talking to potential customers, the design team was focused on the primary users of our field solution.
My role allowed me to direct our research efforts to focus on what we understood to be our feature gaps. Much of the field pack operation was familiar – but we hoped to further expand our views to make sure we understood the complexity of introducing it into a relatively stable system of existing features.
The importance of field research
- Identify process gaps – field packing wasn’t something our product currently supported, and would require significant changes in our production tracking solution.
- Observe field behavior – each grower would have minor differences in field pack operations, but there were processes and behaviors unique to berry packing, which we recorded and cataloged.
- Address immediate concerns – we wanted to improve the quality of production, perhaps we could address these unrelated production tracking issues within our product solution.
- Interviews – we talked to field workers, managers and the owner of this particular operation to better understand needs that may have not been easily seen through passive observation
- Understanding changes in how workers production numbers are tracked and paid out – Berry operations worked differently than most citrus, apple and stone fruit operations in that because fruit is packed on the field, the counting and quality control processes happen almost immediately, and pay expectations are such that they get paid the same day for the work performed.
- Field testing prototypes – because we had designers in the field, we could quickly create low-fidelity prototypes in Figma, print them out and take them into the field asking questions about how a packing manager might interact with these new additions to support field packing.
Process to Feature Mapping
This helpful diagram was created after our field research sessions to help the product and engineering team understand the scope of new features because of significant changes in the field process because of field packing operational needs.
Tradeoffs and risks
With a critical business objective on the line, there had to be discussions around tradeoffs, compromise and risks involved with introducing a new field process operations into a well-designed, well tested (albeit rigid) solution.
Things that would make developing a solution easier (lowers risk):
- Leveraging the existing “Work Bundles” and “Jobs” features, we could segregate some of the complexities of Field Pack setup within the office application mitigating the risk of introducing that complexity to a stable work flow that existing users find intuitive – basically, we won’t have to train office managers on how to add a field pack operation because it would just be “another option” to select with built in templating.
- Tiered Piece rates are similar to rate ranges when setting a rate on a job, which allows us to piggy-back on the logic – instead of an open range, the tiered piece rates could be static numerical entities within a predefined range in multiple tiers – doing this would save us hours of engineering time and refactoring.
- We could further segregate Field Pack feature requirements like the Pack Styles feature – making it visible to ONLY growers who would use it – why turn it on if it isn’t going to be used – limiting confusion of introducing a new feature.
Issues that would introduce risk and uncertainty (problems to solve):
- We would need to change the way label rolls are paired – instead to an entire crew, or a single person – a small team that may change throughout the day. Since label rolls were currently attached to a specific crew and day/shift – we would have consider changes in our scanning solution hardware/software to allow for labels to belong to an individual (or small team) rather than a whole crew.
- We would need to allow for re-pairing of label rolls of those rolls become compromised in any way – during our research, we understood that labels might dry out, or get lost or misplaced because instead of them being managed by a single field manager, they would be given to several small teams to label their own field packed boxes.
- Rate calculation would need to take into account the tiered piece rate which is based on production records – berry growers often paid out based on tiers – the more you produce, the more you get paid – there would need to be a way for us to track the first XX of packed boxes, pay out a certain amount, and then pay out more if packed boxes reached other tier threshold of pay. This was unique to field packed produce.
Thinking deeply
Often times, when teams start discussing tradeoffs and risk, they often see tradeoffs as shortcuts, product managers may be thinking that they will save time and go to market faster, and engineers won’t have to do “extra” work, saving resources – but often tradeoffs are starting points, where you have a well defined solution that has created the ability to scale functionality. That scale will always come with other design and user considerations.
When teams start talking about risk, they can often get trapped in analysis paralysis, and see risks as roadblocks – so they look back to find more compromises and tradeoffs become a bargaining tool – “we can have this done in two weeks, or we can have it done in two months – which one do you want?”
As the design leader charged with creating more design aware product development culture, I wanted to step in to do two things: mitigate as much risk as possible, and exhaust any future risks to scale by looking to each compromise or “shortcut” with some scrutiny.
“Virtual” Field Packing
In order to address the concerns above and the risks caused by introducing Field Pack, we had to spend a considerable amount of time in small iterative design sprints that always resulted in getting our work in front of our valued end users in both the office and field.
I led and created an exercise where we’d imagine “virtual” fields in which we tested every single addition, change and enhancements we made to existing features, usually with one of the field managers who acted as a “director” putting actors into place and role-playing through several scenarios such as check-in behaviors, label roll pairing and management, crediting and check-out.
This allowed for quick iterative learning and validation cycles without disrupting customer operations.
And in this case, saved us time, because we validated the tradeoffs and shortcuts, we addressed and solved for much of the risk. It was a really fun way to make sure we were designing the right things in the right way.
A return on design investment
With goal of 10 field pack customers by the end of Q2, Royal Oaks Farms was our first, and one of the most lucrative partnerships for PickTrace to date.
After a short trial, and a week long implementation, Royal Oaks went live with the new Field Pack features at the beginning of March 2022.
Royal Oaks Farms represents a significant dent in our SAM Expansion initiative by adding $1.2M in gross revenue AND as a bonus, this customer also added to our end of year gross payroll objective! Adding $5.2M, which is around 20% of the $26M we need to close the gap from $149M to $175M by EOY.
After just two weeks of use, Royal Oaks Farms committed to expanding PickTrace into ALL of their berry operations, not just strawberries as the first agreement stipulated.
They were so pleased with how seamless the features were to their existing workflows and field processes, they signed on to be beta testers for new features creating a significant design resource considering customer access scarcity.
These are significant wins for the design team – The Field Pack project was the first “design led” initiative where PM’s took a back seat and allowed for design to define and set strategy.
Initially skeptical of design’s research plan; the time and effort invested paid off.
Design’s value was on a path to be seen as so much more than wireframes and prototypes.
And it doesn’t end there…
With the work we did for Field Pack, we introduced several enhancements to R&D.
- Created interactive research and validation methods that proved to be highly successful without disruption.
- Created new collaboration channels between design and engineering to solve for system architecture complexity BEFORE ideation
- Design was able to pilot and then introduce this feature using new design system components which increase speed to delivery to less than 30 days (est. was 3 months)
- Design worked with product to develop new methods of iterative delivery further creating design trust and deeper investment in design strategic planning, ideation and delivery
What I learned as a leader
Building a team, while communicating and delivering on design’s value is difficult. But the power of people always prevails and my experience at PickTrace, and this project specifically, really reinforced my beliefs that designers can be the glue between so many moving parts. It added validation for building consensus around a solid strategy that not only considered business needs and feasibility, but kept us open to opportunity and scale.
Design and business go hand in hand, it was critical for design to be just as informed and accountable to business goals and objectives when asking for a seat at the table.
Design doesn’t happen in a vacuum and is a community opportunity to involve cross-functional partners in how designers make decisions and how we approach problems to establish a shared vocabulary of success.
You can absolutely compromise and deliver design that serves and values the user’s needs. There are always paths for a customer-first approach when you’re not trying to balance them against business needs. They can work together.