General System Platform
2023 - 2024 · Principle Product Designer
As part of the go-to-market team, I researched and designed the offering for a SaaS platform to commercialise a novel spatiotemporal database.
The problem
Having built a geospatial database capable of ingesting and querying vast quantities of data, Excession wanted to offer it to commercial customers as SaaS — a greenfield line of business.
tl;dr
- Explored opportunities in the market with the PM and validated potential solutions.
- Iteratively designed the UI, soliciting constant input from Product, Engineering and customers.
- Facilitated the outward-facing team tasked with applying geospatial algorithms to customer problems.
Impact
We wanted to carve out a new market for a neglected type of data - real time spatiotemporal. By the end of this process we had honed in on a vertical with which to "cross the chasm" and signed up 2 customers for paid trials with 2 more in negotiation.
Key screens
- Insight: With our proposed metered business model, managing cost was a frequently expressed fear - people having been burned by competitors.
- Solution: I designed a dashboard to show how costs were accumulating and which sources were responsible, providing oversight and actionable insights.
- Insight: Configuring datasets was an unusual process because of the novel underlying architecture.
- Solution: The creation flow gave me the opportunity to gradually introduce the unfamiliar concepts without overwhelming.
Each step was as small as possible to allow for more explanatory text than normal.
Some of the decisions were very technical but could have serious repercussions so I crafted careful, succinct microcopy to make them less intimidating.
Process
Discovery
I created a set of use-case vignettes, along with pseudo-code. The product manager and I then conducted phone interviews with individuals in the enterprise space, piecing together the vignettes to suit their vertical. This allowed us to explore the market and discover common use cases that resonated with potential users.
We proposed and discarded several product offerings before settling on one that seemed to encapsulate our value.
R&D in the Field
At the same time, working with the CPO, I proposed a new, outward-facing team to gather more real-world use cases - similar to professional services but with a remit to conduct "R&D in the field" rather than derive revenue. I went on to facilitate a team of geospatial-specialist data scientists (the Solutions Team), who used off-the-shelf tools to solve real customer problems, building a deep understanding of the use cases. This work provided more use cases to feed into the discovery work and was instrumental in shaping the offering.
Shaping the offering
Starting from scratch, I did a high-level pass of the competitive landscape - looking for patterns and expectations. Then, in collaboration with the database's PM, I mocked up a first guess at a minimal set of functionality. Our objective was to build just enough interface for the product to be usable by customers.
The PM and I presented this to the engineering team and took their feedback on what was missing, what we'd misunderstood, what was working. I then iterated on the mocks, increasing the fidelity as confidence improved.
Through this process we fleshed out technical items like authentication and authorisation, configuration requirements and API, and user experience items like usage metrics, billing transparency and trouble-shooting.