Fluent Commerce is a scale-up that has attained significant success as a composable order management system (OMS) differentiating itself with the ability to be customised to the customer’s present and future needs. Like most startups, this business was looking to scale. Following the departure of its previous designers, Fluent’s leadership team were looking for design leadership to help tackle the growing complexity of its product and customers. I was brought in to set up and lead a new product design function at Fluent Commerce.

I had the opportunity to reinvent what design meant and how design functioned at Fluent Commerce. My first objective was to understand the product better, the current state of play including the work that had been done before me, the business’s perception and understanding of design, and their thoughts on the problems to be solved. Following this understanding I begin to create a first cut of our Design Thinking program.

This program would frame the new design function. It would give context and meaning to our practice and approach. This program was communicated within the first quarter of my commencement date. Being a very engineering-led business there were many questions and blank stares but success would come not from communicating my plans for the design practice but from starting to implement and refine this approach day in, day out, project by project.

Business Objective

• As we moved from a startup to a scale-up it was more critical to get it right by reducing the risk. The only way to do this was to understand our customers better and co-create our solutions for and with them. In this case, we had 2 simultaneous customers, the end user (business users) and the system integrators (Implementer). See this persona work here

• Inspire and educate teams with innovative practices and ways of thinking.

Customer Problem

• There was recent feedback from our implementation partners about the lack of significant innovation or capabilities they could deliver to their customer

• There was also feedback from our sales teams that our competitors were delivering more out-of-the-box reducing time and cost to the customers to implement an order management system

Design Challenge

• Create a program to better understand our types of customer and their needs for an order management system. Develop a product-wide framework to facilitate understanding (problem to be solved), discovery (how we are going to solve that problem) and delivery (fast follow with testing and feedback).

Achievements

• Created a buzz, excitement and energy about our team, our practice and its transformational capabilities

• Begun to change the perception and objectives of design through the rigour and delivery of the practice into key projects

• Evolved the product development framework to include Design Thinking processes and principles

• Broadened the audience of Design Thinking to include engineering and more technical infrastructure-related projects

• “This is epic” was a comment made by our SVP of Product referring to the work our team had facilitated for the Unified View of Inventory (UVOI) feature bringing together all the understanding around a solution driven by the design team in the absence of a product manager. See this work here