The goal of this project was to support our client in product design and technical implementation of a benchmarking/smart farming tool that allows farmers to enter their data, monitor their KPIs and compare them to market/industry standards.
I led the design of the platform between September 2018 and March 2019. I worked alongside a Product Manager, Researcher, Data Scientist, and 2 Engineers.
We stopped working on the project during the implementation phase, when the platform was starting to be built.
Our client, DMK, a large German dairy products manufacturer, came to us with the request to build a tool for farmers, whose milk they buy on a regular basis, that would enable them to quantify their performance and compare their data with other farms.
Our ambitions were to create a strong foundation that embraced a highly competitive business and enable other potential opportunities.
Our high level goals were to:
• Make it fast and easy to use for farmers on-the-go
• Give farmers more control over their money & revenue
• Create a platform for innovation and deeper engagement.
We also wanted to confirm or disprove the assumptions that our client had, as well as understand the bigger picture and how this product would fit in it.
Our research phase started with writing various hypothesis and defining the goal for this phase:
"To specify user needs and validate interest of dairy farmers in comparison software."
We then proceeded to recruit and interview 13 farmers with various herd sizes and technical affinity. Based on these interviews, we were able to define two user personas:
After defining the personas, we continued to structure the information and find common themes and pain points that farmers mentioned. We defined 9 major areas that where repeatedly discussed during the interviews:
Based on the identified problem areas, we came up with the following opportunity areas and "How might we" questions, that later informed the ideation sessions:
1. "One tool to rule them all": access to all farm-related data using a central & integrable access point.
How might we...
• help Otto and Hannah deal with isolated and scattered software solutions?
• allow Otto and Hannah to see the overall status of their farm as easily as possible?
2. Enable comparability of different farms using a consistent data collection format (herd vs. cow level; farm size; etc.).
How might we...
• compare farms accurately without a uniform data collection format?
• enable farmers to compare themselves according to the criteria most important to them?
3. Increase responsiveness to problems using collectable data.
How might we...
• provide Otto and Hannah with relevant milk quality/quantity data at the right time?
• help them make the right decisions at the right time?
• provide Otto and Hannah with personalized recommendations based on their farm data? ... Close data gaps and collect the necessary data for further analysis?
4. Save time and manual work through automatically provided concrete insights and suggestions for improvement.
How might we...
• make the comparison between farms more usable for Otto and Hannah?
• help Otto gain insights into his key performance indicator, feed-milk efficiency?
• develop a system for Otto's smaller (and less digitized) operation so that he does not have to set up a complex system with useless functions intended for large operations?
Based on the pain points and ideas, we identified two key feature ideas:
1. Benchmarking key farm metrics
2. IoFC (Income over feed cost) to start collecting this important for farmers data point, and enable them to optimise their costs later on. Also, with the help of this feature, we were hoping to drive more interest to the platform.
After a round of presentation and feedback, I proceeded to designing a more detailed version of the platform. After the round of visual designs was completed, we reached out to the farmers and asked for their feedback, which was then implemented into visual designs and MVP.
The project ended in March 2019 with the handover to our client.