GigNow Roadmap and Product Strategy

GigNow connects contract workers to current opportunities around the world. Our team was asked to help them build a digital strategy based on insights from their users.

The project involved:
Rapid prototyping, user interviews, interview synthesis, concept sketching, wireframing and annotating, workshop design for alignment across disciplines, and roadmap design.

The current platform has already seen success with 28,000 total candidates, averaging 1,500 new candidates a month. The question was, where do they go from here?

The Plan

I helped our team develop a comprehensive plan with
5 project stages. Each activity and deliverable was designed to help us arrive at a user informed and actionable roadmap for the GigNow team.

1. Landscape Research

2. User Interviews and Concept Testing

3. Feature Workshop

4. Kano Model Analysis

5. Prioritization Session and Concept Testing

Landscape Research

The GigNow team helped us by identifying their top competitor sites. After analyzing the sites, I created a comparative analysis report. This helped us assess the type of features that were most common throughout the industry and assess how GigNow was stacking up. I looked at 19 major features across 6 competitor platforms. Our team used this info to select major features and build prototypes. 

User Interviews and Concept Testing

Using the key features we identified from the comparative Analysis, we designed prototypes to aid in user interviews. The qualitative user interviews were held with 10 contract/freelance workers. The goals for this research were to collect first impressions and expectations around each of the following features or concepts:

Users were shown a series of wireframes and asked to respond while thinking-out-loud. They were also asked a series of questions about what they would expect to be able to do within each section.

Based on their feedback, we were able to deliver 10 key insights.

We further sorted these insights into 4 key themes. The themes could act as experience principles for the GigNow design team moving forward.

3. Feature Workshop

Next, we brought these findings into a collaborative feature workshop. Activities in the workshop included:

1. Affinity Mapping - An Idea generation exercise to collect as many feature ideas as possible, based on what we learned from the user interviews.

2. Business Value vs. User Value - This is a mapping exercise to help the team identify key features that provide a high user value while simultaneously aligning to business objectives.

3. Buy-A-Feature - Finally, we used the ‘Buy-A-Feature’ activity in which individual GigNow team members placed stickers next to features that believed to be the most essential going forward. Using this method, we gathered a list of 23 features we could then continue to refine for the Kano Model Analysis.

4. Kano Model Analysis

After coming out of the workshops with a solid list of features, we took those features and conducted a Kano Model Analysis.

To help our recruited users complete the survey, they were shown visual prototypes.

From this research we were able to determine which features were:

Required
High Priority
Medium Priority
Low Priority

5. Prioritization Session and Concept Testing

With a clear list of prioritized features from contractors, we conducted a short prioritization session with the GigNow tech and product teams to determine which features should be built first. We then took the top prioritized features and further refined the wireframes for a final phase of concept testing with users.

Below are some examples of concept we tested and our findings.

6. Final recommendations and Roadmap

Finally, our team presented a cohesive set of final recommendations to the GigNow team with clear and decisive input on what to build. We were able to give explicit recommendations on the approach to take based on user input and when it should be built based on agile methodologies. The image below shows an example of some of our final recommendations.