We decided that first we’d answer:

Who are our users?

How and why are they customizing their business processes?

Does that work for them? What are the pain points?

Then we’d:

Cluster use cases, look for themes

Evaluate based on criteria

Isolate a problem statement and initial use case to explore

Collecting and clustering use cases in our work space. Again, we externalized so that everyone could stay on the same page even if they weren’t doing the research.

We conducted this research with a combination of interviews, surveys, more detailed data analysis, site visits, and more.

Our research taught us that ecommerce managers did exist and did have differentiated business processes. We collected unique examples of use cases, and identified patterns in how they were expressed.

We learned tasks were accomplished today with custom code, off-the-shelf apps, and manual work. And none of those solutions were working well.

Our users were not all technically savvy — something important when evaluating visual programming as a solution.

These findings gave us confidence to move forward with the product concept, and helped us form opinions about how we’d approach design and implementation.

Most importantly? The concept itself was no longer the riskiest part.

Create and tell stories

We identified and mitigated another unlikely source of risk: buy-in. Because we re-evaluated the concept and came out the other end with an edited concept, we had to make sure stakeholders and team members were on the same page.

To mitigate this risk, our secret weapon was storytelling. Stories are essential for ambiguous projects.

Stories gave us a way to validate our ideas with people who had thought a lot about the topic already. If we weren’t able to convince them of our plan, we had a chance to learn why and find out what we might be missing.

As a team, we told stories both informally and formally:

Coffee conversations, presentations, meetings, and other face to face chats to pitch ideas and hear feedback

Narrative about research findings which pointed people towards more supporting information if they were curious

Narrative about the vision we were trying to achieve and why we thought it was worthwhile

To start, we told a story about why we were going out and doing research and what we were looking for.

We had key phrases that we repeated over and over again, like “If we see everyone doing the same thing, we should build that feature.” or “If the processes our users want to automate are extremely complex, we will be looking closer to the code end of the complexity spectrum. If the processes are simple, we want to help them program without even realizing they’re programming”. These phrases evolved over time as we learned, but there were always clear and consistent themes we tried to drill into peoples’ minds.

Typically the best and easiest story you can tell about a project is what most users will use it for.

We called this the “hero use case” — the powerful use case that expresses the ideal use of the product and the mention of which grounds teams in real user empathy.

Somewhat uniquely, our project did not have a “hero use case.” One of our foundational concepts was that merchants would all use it in differentiated ways. We had to make clear that the project was inherently about the differentiation and not about the hero use case, and refused to give only one example in any context.

Stories gave us a way to validate our ideas with people who had thought a lot about the topic already. If we weren’t able to convince them of our plan, we had a chance to learn why and find out what we might be missing.

Few projects are handed off in such a way that all information is transferred from the originating brains to the executing brains. This was a context we could use to pull more of that information.

We also got lots of new brains thinking about a complicated problem space. Being new in a company like Shopify meant many of us didn’t yet know who we should collaborate with or who even had the information or data we needed. By telling compelling stories, we created a sort of distributed brain of all interested parties to think on our behalf.