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B2B Experience Strategy

@ Airspace

Airspace, a tech-enabled start-up in the time-critical logistics sector, serves diverse industries like healthcare, manufacturing, and air transportation. Positioned as a disruptor, Airspace operates in a mature yet crowded market. Over time, legacy players started catching up to Airspace’s technical capabilities, diminishing its market differentiation. To sustain its competitive edge, I spearheaded a cross-departmental initiative, crafting a 5-year product strategy. This strategy focused on identifying and prioritizing market opportunities and unmet needs. The insights from this research have since been instrumental in shaping and guiding Airspace's product development trajectory.

The Problem

Airspace, a time-critical logistics startup, has long been recognized as a 'premium' and 'tech-forward' player in the industry. As the logistics market evolved, Airspace faced a crucial strategic decision about its future direction. Despite strong growth in recent years, the pace was slowing. Competitors were gaining ground in the time-critical logistics arena, putting Airspace’s dominant market position at risk.

Although customers still perceived Airspace as a strong option for their time critical logistics needs, the company’s position as the unequivocal leader in tech-driven logistics was eroding. The key innovations that had set Airspace apart – automated routing, comprehensive tracking, and a robust fleet of independent contractors couriers – were being adopted industry-wide, signaling a significant shift in market dynamics. This created the risk of shifting to a price-centric competition, which was a race-to-the-bottom scenario that would undermine Airspace’s market strategy as a premium logistics solution.

Airspace's product roadmap was focused on enhancing current functionalities. This risked only yielding incremental improvements - and allowing competitors more time to catch up. It was clear that strategic innovation was needed, both to maintain Airspace’s current market position, and also to expand it. A clear, long-term vision was essential to inspire the team towards delivering superior time-critical logistics services. The pressing questions we faced were: What unmet needs existed in the crowded market that Airspace could fulfill better than anyone else? How could Airspace develop the next generation of time-critical logistics services and secure its place in the evolving market?

The Plan

Recognizing the emerging challenges, the executive team sought innovative strategies to steer R&D investments for improving competitiveness over time. To answer this call I presented the idea of creating an Experience Vision for the company. The 'Experience Vision'—a research-backed product design tool—focuses on identifying strategic transformations in the customer journey. These transformations can then be used as guideposts to align short term efforts towards producing strategic outcomes over the course of several years. This strategy helps balance the near term needs of agile flexibility with the long term needs of responding to changing market conditions.

For this project, we decided to use a 5-year timeline as the objective. This would be far enough out that it could be an expansive vision, while near enough that it would provide tangible direction for upcoming R&D investments. The project aimed to envision the future of Time Critical Logistics in five years and determine how Airspace can distinguish itself in that landscape

The proposed timeline was mapped out and refined with stakeholder feedback to deliver a well researched and thorough experience vision.

To provide a predictable and structured approach to this complex project, I proposed a four-phase plan to research and collaboratively develop the experience vision:

1. Customer Discovery Research - Mapping out unmet needs and pain points among current and prospective customers.

2. Collaborative Ideation Workshops - Sharing early research results and generating collective ownership of the vision.

3. Asset Development - Creating visually engaging assets for effective communication of results.

4. Communication of Results - Socializing results company wide to spur action and

Customer Discovery Research

The customer discovery research aimed to identify current customer problems and unmet needs to lay the groundwork for envisioning how that experience could be transformed. Trends identified here would provide the raw materials that could inform a re-imagining of the product offering 5 years down the road. The research combined internal interviews, user interviews, and ethnographic studies to gain a comprehensive understanding. Key research questions in this phase focused around understanding what customers liked about Airspace, what were sources of frustrations, what were their unmet needs, and what got in the way of closing deals.

The research unearthed critical insights, revealing strengths and weaknesses in the user journey. Many of these challenged the conventional understanding of our customers and our product experience. Several key insight came to inform the subsequent design work:

Airspace fulfilled a complex array of services for customers - moving a package was just the starting point of customer expectations.

Insight 1: Product Complexity vs. Technology - Airspace’s broad range of services, while appealing, often complicated the eroded product’s effectiveness.

Although Airspace offered a core next flight out service, customers often shipped with Airspace due to our willingness to offer a wide array of ancillary services. These included special notification services, custom package handling, repeating routed work, and many more. This flexibility was appealing to customers because it allowed Airspace to fit into their needs more effectively than our competitors. However, this also created a challenge and potential liability for Airspace.

The core technology that guided our next flight out services was not designed to support these extra services as well. This created the risk that these details might fall through the cracks - which could undermine customer trust in our services. Additionally, it also caused many customers to receive little to no benefit of the technology they had been demoed during sales. If their particular type of order did not fit the mold, they would be told to just call in (circumventing the order placement form) or to ignore the price and speed quote that was generated.

This suggested that increasing the ability to track and accommodate these requirements could be a driver of future differentiation for Airspace, while also bringing existing customers up to par with the product driven aspects of the Airspace experience.

When Airspace signed a contract with a customer, the sales process was only just beginning.

Insight 2: Customer Decision makers vs. Day to Day users - Getting in the door was just the start, and Airspace needed to win over the day to day users to win wallet share

Although it was often tempting to think about Airspace “winning” an account and getting all business, in practice customers often made purchasing decisions with a portfolio strategy. Rather than a winner-takes-all sales process, customers are savvy purchasers who build a set of overlapping logistics providers each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Closing a deal gave Airspace the ability to be considered for given orders - but each decision maker at a customer could select who to ship with on an order by order basis. Their decision was informed by relationships with logistics vendors, past performance on that type of order, quote competitiveness (in terms of speed and money), and ease of placing an order.

This had serious implications for the Airspace experience - understanding and enriching the experience of order placers at companies was as important to growth as winning

Friction at key moments could turn customers off from using Airspace, regardless of overall logistics performance.

Insight 3: Smooth deliveries but friction filled experiences - Friction at key moments in the user journey undermined the Airspace Brand

Another trend that emerged from the initial expert interviews was that friction and user disappointment often occurred at key moments in the user journey which undermined customer trust and dulled their excitement. During onboarding, training, order placement, tracking, delivery and billing, the process moved less smoothly than customers were expecting. Although not affecting all customers on all orders, these speed bumps caused frustration and disappointment among customers. As is often the case, one bad experience could tarnish the overall perspective of Airspace in these customers minds. Paired with the federated purchasing process, chronic frustrations could quickly damage the wallet share Airspace enjoyed at a given customer account.

Understanding the patterns and drivers of these points of friction provided a key foundation for the next phase of the design process.

Synthesizing An Easy to Use Customer Journey

In addition to the above high level themes, I collected detailed insights that spanned the breadth and depth of the customer experience. Airspace has a complex and multi-faceted product, with multiple types of customers and layers to the experience. Using the Kano Model, insights were categorized into three layers: threshold (basic needs), performance (decision-making factors), and delight (emotional impact)

The Kano model provides a powerful tool for making sense of complex experience information and targeting strategic redesign work.

In the threshold layer, insights pertaining to fundamental customer requirements are mapped out. These are points where problems that occur can cause the loss of a customer - or prevent a deal from progressing at all. Observations placed here should reveal sore spots for one or more customer types that significantly inhibit the company’s growth. To maximize market potential, a future vision for the product should include a path to eliminate most or all issues in the threshold layer. Additionally, a long term strategy can seek to expand customer’s expectations of what falls in the threshold layer by delivering excellent experiences - forcing competitors to react.

The performance layer organizes information about the “sliding scale” criteria that customers use when making purchasing decisions. These include both straightforward dimensions, like price or coverage, and also more nuanced categories, like the set of configurable options or features. When two vendors both meet the underlying threshold requirements to win consideration, customers typically next judge the companies based on their relative competitiveness in the performance band. By organizing information about how customers view Airspace’s performance across the user journey, I was able to highlight opportunities to build on and deepen Airspace’s competitiveness in the future vision.

The final layer in the Kano model analysis is the “delight” band. This layer helps identify the somewhat intangible qualities that can set a brand apart in a big way. While the other two layers describe more nuts and bolts elements, qualities in the delight band often strike customers on a more emotional spectrum driving brand loyalty and winning advocates. The delight layer can be further divided into elements that provide ease of use, aesthetic appeal and create a compelling story in relation to the brand. In the context of the experience vision, moments where Airspace provides delight value for some users could become focal points of inspiration to expand that delight to more users. Additionally, parts of the journey that did not contribute to the delight value offering could become prime opportunities to provide a deepened and more refined experience.

Insights from customer research organized along the Kano model, highlighting fundamental expectations , sliding scale performance metrics, and sources of delight across the customer journey.

With this framework in mind, I organized the varied insights I had collected - and that had been generated by previous research - across the user journey. This highlighted both the strengths and weaknesses of the product offering across touch points. This analysis culminated in a narrative of the customer journey, highlighting the highs and lows in an accessible format. Although this lost some depth relative to the full insight catalog, it provided a powerful artifact that communicated the results of the research in an approachable way. This became a key asset for empowering the team to re-imagine the experience in the collaborative workshops.

Collaborative Ideation Workshops

Following the discovery research, we transitioned to a co-creation process to give the wider company a chance to digest the findings and envision the future user experience.

First, I organized a series of company wide workshops giving team members a chance to engage with the research and contribute their ideas. In each workshop, 8-12 team members from various departments were guided through the research-based user journey. They were given a chance to reflect and discuss the results - layering in their own experiences and observations with what the research found. Then they were given a time to re-imagine the journey, elevating low points and building on high points. Some chose to sketch their ideas, while others simply wrote out their ideas on sticky notes. The goal here was to collect the ideas and insights of the wider team that may not have been captured in the discovery research. This also served to create a sense of shared ownership across teams, giving everyone a sense that their voices were heard in the design process. They then shared these ideas with the group.

In total, I facilitated ten co-creation workshops, gathering ideas from every department and over half of the company.

A series of easy to understand "transformation themes" were selected from across the user journey, encapsulating both current problems and the ways the team re-imagined them.

Synthesis of design ideas

After these workshops, I organized the design ideas that were generated to identify patterns and establish overarching themes. To do this I first decomposed the re-imagined user journeys participants had created into smaller units and grouped these. Next, I created synthesized technological themes that emerged from the ideas - simplifying and removing details to streamline the results. Finally, I built a framework of “user transformations” around the design ideas that team members had created. These transformations categorized design ideas into high-level themes, simplifying problem-solution understanding.

During this step I also blended the original research back into the process, contextualizing the design ideas users had created with the original discovery research. These themes covered the end to end user journey. To further organize them, I grouped them into four high level phases of the user journey: onboarding, order placement, delivery and relationship building. This created an effective, MECE (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive) pyramid structure that allowed the complexity of re-imagining the end to end user journey to be much more easily digestible. Rather than an endless array of problems and ideas, the research and potential ideas for the user journey were a neat hierarchical structure with user experience transformation themes at the top and key capabilities under them. Further details drawn from the workshops were then used to add detailed examples of the high level key capabilities.

Starting with rough storyboard sketches, the experience vision was slowly fleshed out.

Asset Development

To effectively communicate the experience vision, I guided the design team in a storyboarding process, aiming to create memorable illustrations and narratives. To facilitate this workshop, I presented the themes and key technologies to the design team members. Next, the team sketched out keyframes to create an engaging high level story. After presenting their sketches, we iterated on the ideas and sketches until we arrived at a tight and cohesive story that communicated the key ideas of the experience vision.

High fidelity and hardcopy assets were developed using a comic book aesthetic. These helped the team coalesce around a re-imagined Airspace experience.

Finally, in collaboration with an illustrator and graphic designer, we created high-fidelity, cartoon-style storyboard cards to visually represent the experience vision. Along with a detailed and persuasive presentation, we also created physical assets that could be hung around the office to help keep the ideas salient.

The experience vision was visualized in a variety of ways, including with printed posters hung throughout the office.

Presentation and Executive Workshops

To build momentum for the experience vision, I initiated workshop style presentations of the storyboard and key details, starting with the executive team. I guided the executive team through an exercise to discuss and rank the key technologies and transformations that had been identified. This helped them envision possible roadmaps and make strategic prioritizations across the comprehensive vision. This also created a chance for me to answer any questions about the experience vision (although the executive team had been involved in co-creating it every step of the way, so there were few surprises).

The CEO, acting as the final decision maker in the workshop, then picked the top three transformations to focus on implementing first based on the feedback from the team. This provided a high level strategic direction for the company and R&D team. These choices were subsequently used to inform the company's strategic vision statement, and other strategy documents .

The presentation provided an easy to follow narrative of the current and re-imagined customer experience across the user journey.

Finally, to generate widespread understanding and engagement with the experience vision, I gave similar presentations to each department across the company. These presentations generated a strong response. Distilling complex challenges into simplified forms enabled team members across the company to grasp the big picture more easily. Additionally, since so many team members had been involved in creating the ideas that informed the experience vision, there was a palpable sense of shared ownership with the ideas. After each presentation, team members were given a chance to discuss and engage with the content and how it could be implemented.

To transform the experience vision into a tangible near-to-mid term roadmap, I facilitated a product focused workshop with the head of product, product managers, and senior developers and designers. During these product-focused workshops, stakeholders decided on aligning near-term efforts with the key experience transformations, particularly those prioritized by the executive team. This allowed the federated product teams responsible for different aspects of the work to connect their work to the experience vision and coordinate around interdependencies.

Impact

The Airspace experience vision fulfilled its purpose, serving as a guiding force for the company's product strategy in the ensuing years. Key moments of it were used by executives and product leaders repeatedly at offsites and planning meetings to connect near term decisions to the big picture company objectives. Consequently, the company made strategic R&D investments, systematically addressing significant user challenges.

The experience vision gave otherwise disparate projects a shared goal that enabled cross-system coordination, speeding up design & development times and magnifying the return on investment of new features. This proved to be one of the key benefits of the experience vision - empowering agile development teams to work towards a shared goal in an iterative fashion, while avoiding the pitfalls of typical waterfall development processes.

Eventually, the vision evolved into an essential onboarding tool, quickly acquainting new team members with the market’s challenges and opportunities. Subsequent user research was often grounded in the foundational discovery research generated during the experience vision project. This sped up the speed and efficiency of user research going forward by preventing the need to reinvent the wheel, and providing a high level structure that could be used to contextualize new research findings.

Conclusion

At the two-year review, substantial progress had been made in realizing the experience vision, with key sections already implemented. Meanwhile, the key technologies and transformations of other key parts of the vision were in progress. The project had successfully driven company wide alignment and inspired system level improvements to the Airspace product. In turn, these had helped deepen its competitive advantage in the market. This was reflected both in improvements in customer satisfaction (up to 30% higher CSAT scores) and greater pipeline, conversion rates, retention and revenue.

The innovations spurred by the experience vision not only helped double the company's revenue but also enhanced customer satisfaction and increased margins. The Airspace experience vision continues to be an enduring flag on the horizon, rallying the team to collaborate towards creating a boldly differentiated time critical logistics product.

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