Brass banking
2022
Brass Commerce
skills
Product Strategy / Art Direction / Interaction Design / Product Design
my role
I led product and design at Brass in 2022, my primary focus was on building new products for the Brass brand around Commerce. I collaborated with Product (Tolu Saba, Princess Akari), Engineering and the founder (Sola) who was my Manager.
I led design sprints and workstreams, bringing partner teams and cross-functionals together to brainstorm, ideate, design, test, and ship experiments. Additionally, I led Research planning & analysis, Design sprint planning & execution, Stakeholder management, Product specs, prioritisation & milestones, Product Design, UI & interaction design, Prototyping, QA & dogfooding.
the why
With a global market value of $759.5 billion in 2021, apparel, accessories, and footwear rank top of e-commerce shopping categories. Over the next five years, online fashion’s 7.18% compounded annual growth rate will put the industry at +1.0 trillion. Im Africa, the TAM was valued at $49 Billion in 2021.
However, we noticed at Brass that nobody was building a fully vertically integrated commerce product specifically made for African businesses. With this in mind, a new vertical was created inside Brass for called Brass commerce which I was hired to lead product and design.
Key opportunity indicators
Buyers have grown accustomed to industry-standard experiences, particularly when purchasing products online. However, when compared to existing expriences withing the African space, players like Flutterwave or Paystack has not yet achieved feature parity with well-established marketplaces and e-commerce platforms.
Nigerian buyers contribute to around 30% of merchandise shipped to Africa from Amazon.
A clear need for a new vertical.
research & insights
After conducting a competitive analysis, it became apparent that Shops was lacking the same level of features as other fashion e-commerce platforms.
Due to the lack of adequate information (e.g., images, size/fit info, product description, etc.), customers did not trust making purchases on Shops.
The information required by buyers to make a purchase varies depending on the category.
When shopping for fashion items, size, fit, and style are three of the top five most important pieces of information that buyers care about.
We identified 4 key problem spaces Size & Fit, Style, Quality & Media to invest in.
The challenge / goals
Design and build from the ground up, a commerce builder platform that works like Shopify with a focus on the Nigerian shopper and their niche pain points.
Leverage Brass's rich finance and data to provide vertical integration between hosting commerce businesses, obtaining float and providing customer service.
Long term, build support for other types of businessing including meal prep and delivery, soft items including e-books and more.
Strategy & Key decisions
After considering our team's objectives, available data, research insights, and constraints, we have formulated a clear strategy: to design a world class product, create seamless shopping experiences on the customer side and help businsses manage inventory, build relationships and make more money.
I documented all required features, scoped and derisked in collaboration with the CEO and New Product team at Brass and came up with the following list of MVP features.
Inventory Management system (SKUs)
Rich customer management system
Finance management and float
Cross-compatibility between Brass commerce and Brass Money
Robust consumer profiles with rich data to make shopping easier.
Execution
Strategy Step 1.
"MVP to Establish foundations to meet market parity and enable transactions and create relationships between businesses and customers"
Commerce dashboard
We spent a lot of time ideating and creating options for what the perfect dashboard should look like, we attempted to balance complexity with a need to keep it simple and not overwhelm first time users with data, charts and context cards. Our solution focuses on allowing the user to progressively discover the complexity of the dashboard.
Defining success
Usage goal: 100% user adoption from launch, estimated number of hours spent on the dashboard screen and related sub pages.
Primary metric goal: Increase actions made from dashboard screen
Guardrail metric: "do not oversimplify the charts or use custom charts outside of the design system to make it easier for the devs to implement chart logic using Charts.JS
Strategy Step 2.
"One click product import from competition like Flutterwave & Paystack"
Products
We wanted to make it simple for users of existing product to setup shop on Brass commerce with as few as one-click. It wasnt easy to figure this feature out, but we came up with using .CSV files exported from these platforms and then importing to Brass. Additionally we designed a product engine from scratch to allow business owners to customise their products as easily as possible, adding meta data to help customers make faster decisions and much more.
commerce studio
In addition to the products feature, we designed the Brass commerce studio, a full feature e-commerce web builder with a focus on simplicity and speed. I designed 2 starter themes which can be customised from the layout, product placement to the colors and typeface.
Defining success
Usage goal: 1-click imports, seamless setup, quick online store creation and inventory management using SKUs.
Strategy Step 3.
"Obsess with customers and customer satisfaction"
Customer management
One of Brass's core beliefs is that customer satisfaction is the primary metric to track when building any product. we brought that obsession into Commerce by designing specific customer management features and workflows to help Store owners manage churn, encourage purchasing, provide discounts, rewards etc.
In addition to these we also designed a customer facing product attached to Brass commerce which would enable users to manage their spend, access features such as Pay with Brass, Buy Now Pay later, Pay with Budgets and Customisation features.
Defining success
Usage goal: 95% adoption of Brass commerce's consumer facing products especially Pay with Brass.
Success metric: Increase in conversion rate for PDPs with size calibration information
Read more?
Learn how Brass pay with in addition to how we build the BNPL feature. Click the link to read.
Impact
Key results from experimenting with this product.
"data access"
What did i learn?
My contribution to design strategy efforts helped unlock new investment areas, work-streams and projects included in our roadmaps.
Every project at Brass involves talking to at least 3 teams. I was able to manage stakeholders by ensuring we had clear expectations, regular check-ins, alignment, etc
credits
Thanks to this incredible team we exceeded expectations, S/O to them:
Product Management
Kemdirim Akujuobi
Princess Akari
Engineering / QA
Damilola
Princess Akari
Product Design
Kemdirim Akujuobi
Product Management
Kemdirim Akujuobi
Princess Akari
Maintained by Kemdirim
© 2024
London, UK