Outer Labs needed a clearer understanding of who motivated
buyers are and what problems they should invest in
solving.
Outer Labs
Cypress
Product Strategy • Product Design • UX Research
Defining a core product
From navigating the complexities of Covid to the optimization of a growing footprint amidst rising costs, Outer Labs built out custom tools to meet demand for it’s sole client.
As the market started to shift and large tech companies started to reevaluate costs, Outer Labs launched Cypress, an initiative to diversify the company.
Cypress was a research project focused on reflection, discovery, ideation, and validation. What does a core product look like as we diversify the company?
Role
As the product strategist for business development, I served as the intersection between the leadership, business development, and product teams. I oversaw the Cypress venture, conducted research, orchestrated workshops and shared findings with the C-suite and company staff.
Goals
Our users and their pains
Outer Labs had experience working for one large tech company that owned and operated its real estate portfolio. This provided in depth experience with a company that set standards for workplace strategy but we needed to understand the rest of the market, and vendors serving them.
We started a comprehensive user research campaign of interviews with professionals and competing vendors to identify the pains in the market and who the users are of these tools. We used Dovetail to define insights and ran a competitive analysis to identify 3 domains to work in with personas for each.
We engaged with the rest of the Outer Labs team to hear from in-house subject matter experts and worked hand-in-hand with marketing and engineering to understand where our appetite was for a new product.
Building on experience
Outer Labs had deep experience with the commercial real estate and architecture industries and many engineers had experience with startups and hackathons. I established a cross-functional team and workshopped a common model for validating ideas - Intake, Organize, Apply, and Measure.
We used this model to evaluate our competitors then began to test our case studies for ideas from a series of workshops.
Jobs to be done from our ICP personas helped define almost a dozen opportunities and became the foundation for a core product we could take to engineering for estimation and feasibility.
A solution for simulation
Our ICP was struggling to validate scenarios to better manage change and Cypress was a potential solution.
By breaking down the jobs to be done and related goals, Cypress began to take form as a platform for managing change - growth, new construction, lease renewal, or remodeling and downsizing - all real challenges that existing platforms struggle to address.
3 similar case studies were developed and became the starting point for primary research for validation and engagements with secondary market research providers to fill in the gaps. We then took this back to our interview panel and ran a workshop with product, marketing and engineering leadership to pick a case study for the next phase of the venture - prototype.
Impact
Cypress wrapped up at the same time as a contract renewal failed to go through. The research from the team was presented to the company leadership and one case study was chosen for a significant pivot and laid the foundation for the core product Outer Labs is taking to the market today.
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