iRobot

Brief
iRobot’s vision is to build the world’s most thoughtful robotics and intelligent home innovations that make life better.
How might iRobot be a thoughtful partner in people homes through smart home connectivity?
Opportunity Space
There are an average of 9.5 connected devices in the home today that are only as smart as we invest the time to program them to be. iRobot wants to transition from a company that builds products to one that builds partnerships.
Research Process
We used a variety of research methods to understand needs and pain points
We sought to understand the past and current experiences of smart device users, and what gives them peace of mind at home
What is your relationship with your smart home devices?
When do you feel comfortable or uncomfortable at home?
What does “Peace of Mind” in the home mean to you?
Leading Insight
Painpoints
During our user interviews the biggest pain point that emerged was our consumer’s feeling a lack of control over their home environment. This feeling stemmed from three key factors:
Framework
Value Proposition
People often want to disconnect from actively thinking about or doing household tasks so they use smart home devices to relieve mental and physical burden. However, smart devices often don’t work properly or fit in to a person’s daily routine, creating disruption and amplifying stress.
Ecosystem
Framework
- Competitive athletes who are interested in enhancing their performance
- New to having a nutrition and hydration regimen
- Benefit from specific daily recommendations
Sports Nutritionist
- Sports Nutritionists aiming to provide athletes with cutting edge information about recovery
- Have athletes who could benefit from daily support
- Interested in learning which athletes have highest hydration needs
- Track progress and statistics
Business Model
This value proposition can be applied in three categories: Collegiate Programs, Premium Gyms, and Virtual Fitness.
We realized a nutritionist is only one type of influencer that might affect a customer’s decision to use the Gx system, and can be found as collegiate nutritionists to nutritionists at gyms.

We want to propose an expansion on Gatorade’s current strategy by partnering with collegiate teams and external gyms
By partnering with collegiate teams Gatorade can leverage their existing partnerships at D1 schools, becoming the daily insight partner of sports nutritionists. At the same time there is the opportunity to enter the DII and DIII and high school sports market to fill the sports nutrition gap in that segment.
By entering into this partnership, Gx can increase awareness of their product, while solving a key pain point for athletic programs—helping new athletes understand and follow their nutrition and hydration plans despite only meeting 2-3 times with a sports nutritionist each year.
Beyond collegiate programs we see the additional opportunity to partner gyms which have trainers or sports nutritionists in-house. Using this partnership model will help the casual athlete or an athlete training for a competition for the first time to understand where sweat testing fits into their routine and how a nutrition and hydration program can help them have a competitive edge.
We see an additional opportunity to leverage the trends in virtual fitness and home fitness to better understand their athlete’s needs. For gyms and virtual fitness the Gx system will give nutritionists and trainers objective data to provide hyper-personalized, specific feedback in a community setting.
Reflection
- Learned to manage a team of 5 from a diversity of backgrounds and majors
- How to articulate a clear value proposition and business model driven by human-centered insights
- Creating new value for an existing product
- Client communication with the Gatorade team