Context

• Bounce lets users store their bags at stores around NYC and SF.
• Travelers use these locations to leave a bag for a few hours or a few days.
• The founding team knew that travelers only use the service when they are on a trip; to be a breakout success, they needed people who would use them every day.
• They brought me on to identify local users who would use them every day and deliver mobile wireframes that would deliver a great local experience.

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Challenges

• Tiny team. It was me and the two bootstrapped founders. That's it. That meant we had to be ultra-focused in what we set out to accomplish.
  
• Ambiguity. The classic early-stage challenge. There were so many directions to consider--and so little time in which to consider them.
• Offline coordination. There are 5 populations who need to be designed for: store owners, who need to be incentivized to host storage in their locations; store employees, who don't know what Bounce is but have a critical role to play in accepting and helping customers retrieve their bags; couriers, who will (eventually) move items from one store location to another; and finally, customers, who trust Bounce with their things and need the experience to be seamless. There are a lot of seams to hide from the user in, this experience.

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Approach

• Make a framework for key decisions. With so many opportunities and possible directions, we needed to take a step back and ask ourselves what we were trying to accomplish. So I helped the founders build acceptance criteria for selecting a target user and for choosing which stores to onboard. These frameworks helped us identify the essential few tasks from the array of noisy distractions.
• Do things that don't scale. Whether it was cold-calling potential customers to gauge interest, throwing a pizza party to introduce ourselves to business owners, or manually moving customers bags around NYC, getting our hands dirty taught us what customers needed and where the experience was frustrating users. Is carrying a backpack 20 blocks on an icy New York night part of a Product Designers job? Is sitting in a burrito shop to observe a customer dropping off her bags part of a Product Designers job? If it gives you the empathy you need, absolutely.
• Get competitive. We had a bunch of different customer types that we wanted to reach out to, most of whom were small businesses. So we started cold-calling people from Yelp--a pretty unpleasant task. How do we make ourselves do it? I made the first call, in front of both founders, to get the ball rolling, and put up a big sticky note with the tally of how many people each of us had called. It totally worked--we started to become more afraid of losing a competition with each other than we were of cold-calling a stranger.

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Outcomes

• I lead the team to choose a target local user who met our criteria of an intense need, low concerns about security, and one we could actually close: massage therapists. That choice surprised us. I wanted us to find customers who didn't care about some of the tough challenges we'd eventually have to solve, like security, tracking and insurance, that we heard from many users in our research and cold calls. Massage therapists in NYC don’t have cars, but they do have heavy equipment they need to cart from client to client. They already spent a lot on taxis and Ubers—even though they aren’t high income—to get their gear from place to place. Many already spent on storage lockers that were And because of how heavy their equipment is, they were less concerned about theft or misplacement. Most importantly: they were really willing to try us.
• I left the team with mobile wireframes that delivered both for travelers and for the locals (massage therapists) that they were now focused on.

Takeaways

• Getting out of the office really works. Every time we talked to a customer we learned something. It was uncomfortable to approach strangers and ask for help, but the insight was far more valuable than us sitting in a room and guessing about what customers needed.
• Focus on what makes the team successful, not what they hired you for. The team's needs weren't always what I expected. For example, after I shared the designs with the founders, the CTO was denied for a US Visa. So the follow-up calls I do with clients ended up not being about implementation--which they normally are--but about how to keep the team motivated and making progress after a major and unexpected setback. That lead to them focusing on scaling the existing traveler business for the next three months instead of building a mobile app. It was not the outcome I wanted personally--I wanted to see my work in users hands!--but it was what the team needed.
• Focus on the process and the results will follow. Some of our goals, like finding the right target customer, are hard to measure. So when the outcome was difficult, I guided us towards process goals: talk to a certain number of users, close a certain number of customers.