Stone
The one when we helped a startup become a unicorn
Project Overview
Stone is one of the most significant fintechs in Brazil nowadays. Its customers are small retailers throughout the Brazilian territory. To reach them, the company has developed a bold commercial strategy: Spreading sales representatives in several cities around the country, positioning itself next - physically - to these small businesses.
However, this decentralized commercial operation brought challenges. The biggest one is: how to manage the entire commercial activity of prospecting, sales and customer service?
Role:
Lead Designer
Tags:
Continuous discovery
Continuous delivery
Mobile design
Interaction Design
Design challenge
Stone had a technology team focused on building a digital product to serve the commercial operation. When I joined this team, the project was still in its first steps. The mission was to develop an application for the sales team so that they could retain and consult information about customers, market, price, conditions, and any other thing they might need. Little by little, we improved the product, bringing a new brand and several features to make the Stone commercial team sell more and more, making the company grow exponentially.
Designing an ongoing product
Working on a continuous delivery project requires a degree of attention beyond the usual challenges of a finite design project. After all, it is necessary to deliver constant value through new tools (continuous delivery), and on the other hand, it is extremely important to keep activities related to user understanding (continuous discovery). To deal with it, we established agile and continuous discovery-delivery cycles.
Continuous discovery
The continuous discovery steps were aimed at better understanding the needs of Stone's commercial representatives. For that, we adopted the habit of periodically visiting different cities around the country, accompanying the users in their daily routines, from the planning activities to vising customers for prospecting and sales. Thus, adopting Continuous Discovery allowed us constantly identify new problems to approach and validate new insights for the project.
Learn with the user
Analyse data
Map opportunities
Continuous delivery
In parallel, we sought to gain agility and constant value generation. For this reason, continuous delivery cycles were aimed at creating solutions and evolving the application. That way, we ensured that the app was constantly being improved, and we were always delivering new features or upgrades. This delivery cycle included ideation, prototyping, user testing, iteration and implementation phases.
Prototype
Test
Implement
Final product
That's how Marco Polo rises. An application that brings together several tools for the sales team - to improve their performance and help with daily routine.
Route planning tool
During their planning time, the user could schedule some customer visits. The application then used an algorithm to calculate the best route, adding other customer visits to optimize the salesperson's visit time and path, increasing their performance.
Pricing & Fee calculator
One of the most requested tools by the sales team was a pricing calculator for situations when they're dealing with a customer and need to talk about money. Thus, they could open their app and this tool would help them, allowing them to input the rates offered and even compare with competing services.
Customer loss reason
If the user was not successful in a sale, he could report the episode through the app. Thus, it was possible to generate business intelligence through more accurate analyzes based on customer loss data from nearby regions or even on a national scale. The goal was to make this reporting task as simple and intuitive as possible, to encourage users to complete it more often, generating more data for the business.
Results
Over about a year of project development, we achieved excellent results. The numbers illustrate the commitment and dedication applied to make this product come to life and improve it even more for the users. As a reward, the highly positive feedbacks and perceptions about the product and the feeling of knowing that we have provided game-changing tools.
1500+ users throughout Brazil
Improved user performance by +50%
App cited as reference in sales conferences
Working as a lead designer at Stone's commercial technology team was a very learning process in many ways. I was able to explore various design tools and establish a profound connection with users, experiencing leadership and managing the relationship with the stakeholders.
