Packsmith
Company: Packsmith
Platform: Mobile and web
Year: 2022
Role: Product Design Consultant
Team: Chief Executive Officer, Chief Product Officer, and Chief Operations Officer
In the spring of 2022, a close friend reached out and asked for help in crafting the experience for a new product. He was starting a new company called Packsmith and was starting to gather funding for the venture, but without having a tangible design for the product, it was difficult to get full buy in. I worked with him along with his business partners in creating concepts for the initial experience while also helping them formulate overall business processes for the company which helped to ensure that customer experience was being considered at each step.
Crafting an experience
I started the process of designing the Packsmith app by working with the team to map out the full journey of an order through their system. This gave us a sense of what systems would be in play and how the systems themselves would work. It also helped us to map which pieces of information would be shared with customers at any given point and how Packsmith partners would need to interact with them.
With this map of how Packsmith would need to operate, I was able to piece together features that would be necessary in a partner facing application. This was where we wanted to focus first because it would be the most novel aspect of the company processes. I first created user flows so that I could have a sense of which screens would be needed and how the features would work. I then immediately jumped into creating interactive prototypes for the app so that the team at Packsmith could have a better understanding of how the product would work. We focused less on flowcharts at this point and more on interactive prototypes because they needed up raising more questions and pushing discussions further, more quickly.
Workshopping operations
As part of my work with Packsmith, I flew out to Los Angeles so the team could meet with some potential partners and workshop together in person.
We stayed in an Airbnb over a weekend and did a couple of days worth of white boarding, continuing to think through the practical details of how the company would work, and what technology would be required.
I helped the team to structure their thoughts into a series of phases for how their operations would function, stretching across various actors in the system. I also helped the team think through which questions were the most important to answer first, before getting into every detail of how the company would function. This helped them to have a good high level sense of how to talk about their company with investors and other potential partners.
