Atelier
I led our team to capitalize on a thriving niche to drive product-market fit with a mission-driven product.
Project highlights
Led intensive market research to identify and isolate a specific target audience
Designed a business model that keeps software free for users while still generating for-profit revenue
Built an Agile-first squad that valued rapid prototyping and fail-fast mindsets
Discover the Product
As a highly agile squad, we led constant, diverse discovery methods using rapid prototyping to drive our insights. We often took a guess-and-check product magic approach, creating an incredibly low-cost prototype to check our assumptions against as we interviewed our target audience, surveyed the market, and understood where the problem areas lied. We failed fast, weren't afraid to be wrong, and made constant changes to our experiments. This helped us create a product that met our users' exact needs as quickly as possible.
Tools Used
Following our overall ethos, building was a constant part of our strategy. We defined specific assumptions to build prototypes against, either validated or rejected the assumption, then made changes and tried again. We did this over, and over, and over, increasing fidelity just a little each time. I led the big-picture management, helping to make tough decisions, guide the vision, and communicate our work to others. At a certain point, we hit saturation: we were confident that any more work would not reveal any patterns we didn't already know.
Tools Used
Deliver the Results
Atelier became a fully defined experience that leveraged human factors to drive the business. Our research led us to draw from our community's natural desire to do good and contribute to something larger than themselves, using a well-defined brand vision around community, collaboration, and trust to create engagement. This inspired the Atelier creator platform: a space for users of all experience levels to come together for a common interest and goal. We developed a business model that kept the product completely free, taking inspiration from our market research on Wikipedia and GoFundMe.
Tools Used
