When Sellers Give You Lemons
Reverb.com
Type of Project
Product Strategy
My Role
Strategist & Session Leader
Case Study
Objective
It was a fresh quarter and our team was given a new strategic focus: make listings more affordable. As a team focused on designing for Reverb's sellers, how do we accomplish that without simply telling our users their gear simply "isn't worth that much"?
Reverb had worked towards this strategic goal before, but efforts fell flat for any number of reasons. We couldn't just pick up where we left off - we needed new ideas, and quick.
Process
The change destabilized the team's roadmap quite a bit, and we needed to get our feet back under us. It's worth noting that this was quite early into my time as a designer on seller side of Reverb. It was in this strategic reset that I saw the opportunity to get on equal footing with the rest of my team, and build familiarity with the new product space.
I took initiative putting together a dedicated slack channel, gathering team members and other key stakeholders with legacy knowledge of our platform. Long story short, I organized and coordinated an ideation session with all sorts of contributors participating (even developers).
I leaned on my product manager to help set the table with light documentation and analytics while I built a Figjam that let us look at a cross section of our sellers' primary areas of engagement.
Outcome
The session was a huge success, generating 78 ideas that we discussed, reacted to, and categorized within an hour. After that time spent with the wider group, I returned to continue organizing and distilling what resonated. Later, I followed up with the other team leads to talk, triage what was left, and figure out what to do about it.
This effort led directly to the Helping Sellers Price Their Stuff project; a successful experiment that produced $4.7M in GMS earnings and a 9.5% increase in competitively priced listings.
Impact
Related Project
Here's the first project that came of this ideation. Spoiler, it went well.
