Market Intelligence Platform
Early member of a team tasked with bootstraping, launching and scaling a crypto asset market intelligence product for institutional investors.
Company
Elliptic Enterprises
Role
Product Design Lead
Duration
6 months
Location
London, UK
Overview
Elliptic is a leading provider of anti-money laundering services to Virtual Asset Service Providers, regulators, and law enforcement agencies.
Thanks to my background as a multidisciplinary expert in new product development I was approached to join as a cornerstone member of a team tasked with developing a new line of business for the company.
The Challenge
The team's goal was to harness the Elliptic's unique market actor identity data to deliver a compelling market intelligence product for institutional investors seeking alpha from markets in crypto assets.
Key Responsibilities and Achievements
- Developed the initial direction and operational model of the new business.
- Managed the briefing and tendering process for a 3rd party branding agency who would consult on market positioning and messaging.
- Ran product discovery sessions with the target audience.
- Build prototypes and experiments to validate capabilities needed for launching the product.
- Authored the initial go-to-market product backlog.
- Designed the user interface for the new product
- Trained the team in Agile Scrum methodology.
- Wrote the initial API documentation for the product.
- Designed and implemented analytics to track and report on adoption and usage of the product by pilot customers.
Bootstraping
Developing a Business Model
When I began with Elliptic the Market Intelligence team was still at a formative stage. A world of known and unknown possibilities for what the business could become had yet to be filtered into a coherent and actionable strategy. With an aggressive hiring plan in place, and the need to onboard people regarding the overall project goals, it was imperative that a strategic foundation be defined as quickly as possible.
So that a solid direction could be defined in writing I, within my first week, facilitated a collaborative workshop with the leaders of the team. For this I chose to work together with the team on the creation of a Business Model Canvas, a robust format for exploring and developing an high level yet end to end model of how a well rounded business should ideally look and operate.This model served a number of roles at the so called 'fuzzy-front end' of the product development process, including and now limited to:
- Allowing the team to communicate consistently and authoritatively with the wider business about what the project and team aimed to achieve.
- Providing a valuable artefact which could be used to help with recruitment and onboarding of new team members.
- Providing direction for sales to begin building a pipeline of target customers.
- Allowing for the creation of a product backlog and understanding of the technologies and functionality that would be required to deliver the product to market.
- Allowing marketing to understand the target audience and the customer value proposition. Helping them define how they might create effective messaging.
A model such as this would invariably evolve as the team gathered more information about the needs of the customer and the existing competitive ecosystem. Yet as a set of foundational early stage waypoints it performed a valuable role.
Customer Discovery
Given the initial strategic direction was developed internally it was necessary to execute ongoing research with real life customers and users. The product manager and myself planned and ran product research workshops with each pilot customer as they were onboarded.
The workshops were designed to bring clarity to our understanding of the needs, pain points, and expectations customers had regarding our product and their critical success factors as a participant in our early access pilot programme.
The insight derived from these workshops was used to develop the initial product backlog, prioritise the functions and metrics we would deliver, and ensure what we were building was differentiated from our competitors.
Developing the Brand
During the discovery workshops we repeatedly observed that customers would initially have a limited expectation of the type of data we could provide. It came to light that the longevity and success of Elliptic as a provider of anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance tools was in fact driving a number of preconceptions in the minds of market intelligence customers.
Our assumption was that these preconceptions could be mitigated through positioning the branding of the market intelligence product as separate and unique from existing Elliptic offerings. However, the resources and expertise required to complete this work was not available internally and as such we would turn to a specialist branding agency to answer the question of what the ideal positioning should be.
As no product marketing specialist had been hired at this point in time the team leader turned to me to run the tendering process for onboarding an agency. I identified and approached potential bidders, wrote a detailed brief for participants, ran Q&A sessions with each of the 3rd parties that wished to offer a proposal, organised the pitch sessions, and facilitated internal decision making workshops.
Feedback, both internal and externally from the bidders, indicated that the process was run smoothly, was fair, and had been executed in a timely manner.
Developing the product (and the team)
Prototyping and Experimentation
Insight from customer understanding workshops had been valuable for building the initial product backlog. We had planned for delivering a set of prioritised features, metrics, and customer support materials. However there always exists the possibility of a gap between what is said and what is meant when talking with customers.
To quickly and definitively validate the assumptions we had made I created a number of prototypes and experiments that we could explore in the weekly catch-up sessions we had with pilot customers. Artefacts I created for this purpose ranged in fidelity from quick design mockups used to tease out as yet mentioned expectations, to functional prototypes that could be trialled by users over a number of days and would highlight issues with usability, comprehension, etc.
Designing the Platform
I knew from discovery work that from a usage point of view the primary users of the product would be quantitative analysts, data scientists, and engineers. That this audience would have a preferred toolset and/or the need to perform analysis behind their corporate firewall. They would require programmatic access to our offering via an API and want to see availability of high quality developer-focused documentation.
There was however another key audience segment I had to consider. One of paramount importance due to their position as gatekeepers or budget holders within the buying centre of our target customers. This cohort would require a friendly, powerful, yet learnably familiar web-based interface. They would want a UI through which they could explore our product offering, the data available, and develop a tangible feeling for the value that it may bring to their organisation.
With this knowledge in mind, I proceeded with the dual track design of the product. For the technically adept: a top-class developer experience, for which I called for a ubiquitous REST API as well as comprehensive API documentation (which I wrote) and simple code examples for getting started.
For the decision making influencers, who would green light the purchase of the product: A web-based user interface comprising a portal and simple data workbench for exploring our metrics and market intelligence dashboards.
Developing the Team
I am fortunate to have had experience with many project management methodologies. More so to have seen and participated in teams that have succeeded in effectively utilising Agile values and methodologies.
The market intelligence team which was emerging was universally highly skilled as individual contributors, yet lacked experience planning and organisation of the work that needed to be done.
Our team leader did a superb job of creating a sense of camaraderie and purpose within the team, but turned to me to help with developing the team ability to to plan, prioritise, and deliver.
To achieve this I produced two short training sessions. One focused on Agile values and the other on Scrum methodology. Both were accompanied with documentation that could be referred to after the fact.
Beyond this I also took on the role of the Scrum-master for the engineering team. Conducting the necessary ceremonies, supporting decision making, and reporting on progress to the team lead.
Go-to-market and ongoing discovery
Tracking Performance and Behaviour
With the product in the hands of a number of pilot customers my thoughts turned to optimising the methods by which we continued to develop an ongoing and deeper understanding of where we should focus next.
As we scaled the product it would become more difficult to commit time to the hands-on workshop approach we used to develop insight at the front-end of the project with every customer.
Yet now that the product was actively being used I could implement two simple methods for generating actionable information from data derived from usage and from users directly.
Key questions that needed to be answered were:
- Of the market metrics we have launched, which are seeing the most interest and which are seeing the least?
- Which metrics should we focus on delivering next?
To answer the first question I implemented reporting on usage of the API documentation. Showing which metrics were seeing the most visits from customers. While on the second I implemented a ‘Request a metric’ form into the product and the documentation, allowing users to actively request the data they would like to see become available in future updates.
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