One start-up’s story of using Lean UX in the Indian Retail Market (Sanjay Joshi)

At Tarnea, lean UX is fundamental to our product development strategy. Our mission: to bring technology to the “last mile” of Indian retail: the retailers. I will share our story of using lean UX to build a product that an everyday Indian retailer can start using within a few hours.

Transcript

1. Sanjay Joshi, UXINDIA13 Conference Presentation
2. 1 One start-up’s story of using Lean UX in the Indian Retail Market Sanjay Joshi Analyst at Tarnea Technologies, a BLR Start-Up www.tarnea.com Oct 2013
3. What I will speak about today… • Who we are • Why lean UX is important to us • How we execute lean UX • Success: when customers say they love your product • Using Lean UX: What it takes
4. We are Tarnea • 20-member start-up, founded by IT veterans with experience in supply chain, healthcare and product dev www.tarnea.com • Our challenge: connect the “last-mile” of retailers to the supply chain – Supply chain technologies have traditionally focused on the “big” players: manufacturers and distributors – However, manufacturers and distributors do not understand retailers: retailer’s supply-demand mechanism, inventory maintenance and purchase patterns are unknown to them – Integration will bring speed, efficiency and predictability to the Indian supply chain paradigm • We are on our way: – Our first enterprise customer, a large hospital pharmacy in Erode, just went live with our SaaS-based retailer POS. It’s an Android-based Enterprise App. The customer loves our product. – Our implementation calendar is choc-a-block for next 2 quarters. Sales pipeline looks great.
5. Why Lean UX is important to us • Traditional enterprise softwares assume that the user is familiar with computers: • That is not how a regular person thinks! Cognitively, a software should directly map to the user’s actions: • The challenge: to build a product that user can adopt instantly. Our target was to get the user fully acquainted with our SaaS-based retailer POS software in under 1 hour • Lean UX is fundamental to our prod dev strategy
6. How we execute Lean UX The question What we do What will the user do with our software? • We do requirements analysis in the field, not in the office • We’ve spent significant time with customers in their shops, on the road with distributer’s truck drivers, and done sales rounds with pharmaceutical salesmen How to make the user love our product? • Understand day-in-the-life of a customer. Identify opportunities to make her life easier, and maybe even more fun (gamification, in-built quizzes) Does the customer feel the same way as we do? • Our product prototypes are jointly developed by business team, designers and engineers: I like to call it “One Tarnea” team. • We take the prototype back to the customer. It’s amazing the depth of feedback you get, when you give customer a prototype to play around with • Only a customer-validated prototype is taken into development • We are focused on three core questions:
7. Success: when customers say they love your product • Our first implementation’s results surpassed our expectations: – Pharmacy staff was comfortably selling from our software within 30 minutes of go-live – All metrics are up: end-customer satisfaction, Sales and purchase efficiency, savings
8. Using Lean UX: What it takes • You need to spend a lot of time on the road: – One of our co-founders and I spend 3 days in the week on the road with customers, and 3 days with product dev in the office. We validate prototypes with customers: from business owners to salesmen. – To use the time on road effectively, we pack travel days with sales activities • You need to be the user: – We’ve learned that just asking the user for feedback is not enough: you need to replicate their operations using your prototype – We measure metrics when shadowing customers: Are we really adding efficiency? Does my product make her life better than before? If answer is no, we go back to the drawing board • Everyone on the team: founders, dev, and business team, needs to be with the customer atleast 2-3 days in the month. We prioritize customer validation above everything else
9. 8 Thank You! www.tarnea.com