Academic
Pitch
After my internship at Rivian I was interested in creating a digital product for managing the innovation process, helping teams connect their research to their product pipeline.Â
The project started with a pitch to the class over slack:
Opportunity Space
Innovative companies are leveraging design thinking as a point of differentiation to create new product and service offerings. The design thinking process starts with empathy for users through a deep understanding of their needs and leads to the development of rich consumer insights. These insights create opportunities to develop new solutions, which solve problems for their users and capture value for the business.
As design thinking has grown in popularity, project teams have grown to rely on several legacy productivity tools. These tools are not optimized to manage innovation projects and typically result in valuable pieces of projects, such as user insights, becoming lost or forgotten in.There is a clear need for a collaborative, innovation-focused integration platform so new products and services meet all user needs and achieve business goals.
User Research
Target User
Product People
Designers, Engineers, Researchers, Product Managers
Product decision-makers
Product Parallel People
Account/Program managers, communication focused roles, and business analysts
Limited experience with innovation and design thinking
Insight
Professionals working on innovation projects struggle to manage projects across a myriad of digital platforms.Â
- Consumers need a tool for collaboration and project management to integrate the entire project process from research to launch
- Powerful discoveries and insights are easily lost or forgotten while using multiple tools
- Teams need a simplified way to organize past and current work so it can be accessed in the future.
Concept Refinement
Based on our research, we have developed three overarching pillars which will meet our user’s unmet needs:Â
These three pillars allow us to provide a differentiated value to our users that does not currently exist in the market.
Vision
Meerkat is a project management platform for innovation teams to streamline and enhance their product development processes by aggregating project data into a single searchable platform. This enables actionable discovery across tools and accounts. Meerkat will allow users to surface research insights across various levels of specificity and connect project artifacts to the product development process through seamless integration of their existing collaboration tools.
Features
Global Search
Project Dashboards
Insight Management
Tool Integration
Proof of Concept
Onboarding Flow
Project Flow
Global Search
Why Meerkat
Product Evolution
Research Insight Aggregation
Consolidate learnings from all of your innovation activities into one customizable, searchable database.
Innovation Project Management
Manage your innovation projects from start to finish in our portal and assign tasks to team members.
Design Innovation Management
Draw insights using natural language processing to successfully launch new innovation again and again.
Scalable Product
Scalable growth to more organizations while adding additional integrations and enhancing user experience
Reflection
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Refining your product pitch based on user research—I was used to starting with research to find an opportunity, this time validated opportunity from research
- Understand what your core product is to build your MVP and product roadmap
- Imagining and building digital products and physical products aren’t that different
- Utilizing product management tools – MRD, PRD, and Vision Pitch for the first time