Discovery research to inform Zalando's approach to the kids market, directly supporting the Kids proposition expansion.
Research and Strategy
Interviews
Customer Journey
Company
Zalando
Project Duration
Jun'24 - Aug'24
Role
User Researcher
Overview
The team was focused on expanding the Kids proposition, a new strategic focus area for the company. The product and leadership teams were in a discovery phase, they lacked a foundational understanding of the parent customer group. This ambiguity meant they had an unclear problem space, which made it difficult to prioritize what to build. This lack of direction was needed to be addressed to move forward.
Research Approach
Our overarching goal was to build empathy for our customers and create a shared understanding of the parent's journey across the entire organization. We took an exploratory approach to achieve this:
Generative Interviews:We led a series of in-depth interviews with parents to map out their entire journey. This allowed us to capture how they discover, sort, arrange, and manage their children's fashion items.Collaborative Workshops:We partnered with the design team to translate our research findings into "How Might We" statements. This helped us move from abstract problems to concrete, actionable solutions.Mixed-Methods Validation:I collaborated with the analytics team to validate our qualitative insights using onsite data. This gave the entire team greater confidence in our findings and a shared foundation for decision-making.
Impact
The research helped define a clear customer experience vision and informed product strategy.
Defined the Vision:The work was instrumental in defining the customer experience vision for the Kids proposition. We now had a clear focus on key customer problems identified through our research.Shared Understanding:I led an 'experience walkthrough' workshop with product, engineering, and design colleagues. We used the detailed customer journey map from our research, which highlighted how parent needs differed for different age groups of children, to collectively identify quick wins and discuss larger strategic changes. This created a shared understanding across all stakeholders.We were
no longer ambiguousabout what problems to solve; we had a clear, user-centered direction that our research had provided.
Team
2 x User Researcher
My Learnings & Reflections
This project was a significant learning experience in navigating strategic ambiguity. Because the topic was in its nascent stage, we had to work without a clear problem space and lacked direct stakeholders.
This pushed us to proactively
look for stakeholders outside of the immediateproduct teamto understand the space and challenges better.I also honed my skills in
storytelling and presentation,learning how to iterate on our findings to maximize their impact and influence business decisions.The project reinforced the value of looking beyond the immediate team to
uncover deeper insightsand build a comprehensive view of a new problem space.
