The Problem

In beverage alcohol sales, contracts with national chains, like Target or Kroger, can make or break your year. Executing on the contracts involves an intricate web of retail stores, distribution networks, and nationwide sales teams moving in unison. The Fintech Chain product was born from Lilypad users trying to shoehorn the existing feature set into the chain use case.

The Goal

Create a standalone product under the Fintech brand that drives chain success for suppliers by improving field chain execution, decreasing management overhead, unifying disparate systems of record, and providing the insights needed to guide strategy.

Product Discovery

I interviewed a dozen clients of various sizes and niches to understand their problems, key activities, inefficiencies, and org structures. They sent me their processes and spreadsheets they were using at the time. After analyzing the feedback, I determined there were 8 common pain points to solve in the current chain management process and 5 common personas involved. From there I started working through initial wireframes and low fidelity designs.

I took these designs on a world tour, going back to my clients, power users, and even some sales prospects to see if we managed to solve their problems. The feedback was more positive than I could have imagined. From here I began gathering what I needed to build the business case for the product in order to secure internal funding to build it.

Market Analysis

I ran a comprehensive SWOT analysis of the closest competitors I could find, including their features, technology, message, and pricing. After dissecting the total addressable market and customer demand I created a flexible pricing structure that could capture multiple market segments and scale with the size of our clients. From here, I mapped our projected revenue against projected cost in an interactive ROI calculator.

Armed with research, designs, market analysis, pricing, a go-to-market strategy, and a boatload of positive client feedback, I pitched the chain product to our executive board. They approved the project and put up the cash for me to hire the team and invest in the technology required.

Product Management

I’m currently managing a 14 person hybrid team of internal resources and staff augmentation to build the product. I am responsible for complete execution from spec to design to dev to QA to GTM.

Given I designed the low and medium-fidelity product myself, I closely manage our designers to bring the tool to high fidelity.

Underneath me is a team of BAs and PMs who are working through the stories and technical spec for the developers.

Our lead architects and I put our heads together to design the architecture, technical ecosystem, data model, and API layer.

The cloud data warehouse team and I collaborated on requirements for data ingestion, mastering, and APIs needed to power the operational database.

Last but not least, I’m staying close to our users with feedback sessions and roadmap updates so they can do the resource planning necessary to purchase the product later this year.

I’m happy to go into more detail on the project in private conversations.