Building Best Buy's third-party marketplace from the ground up

Best Buy's product assortment needed to grow to better serve our customers. The strategy to address that need was to create a third-party (3P) marketplace. My team was tasked with creating a buying experience for 3P that maintained the experience customers expect from Best Buy.

Overview of my direction to the team

1. Initiate research to understand the business needs and customer expectations
2. Quickly explore options that may address the need
3. Evaluate and iterate on the chosen option

Initiating research

Best Buy is lucky enough to have dedicated researchers within Experience Design. While that's awesome and I love that team, it means we have to be a little more thoughtful about giving our research partners time, clear briefs, and context.

In this case, it meant coming up with the right type of study and questions to understand customer sentiment around making a purchase of a 3P product. Additionally, we needed to plan to evaluate whether the solutions we came up with helped the customer feel confident that Best Buy guarantees a positive purchase experience.

Some leadership decisions I made during this phase:

• I gave direction on the broad research objectives
• I delegated additional objectives and study specifics to my employee and a research partner
• I completely trusted our research partners with the research methodology

Exploring options

At the time of this case, I had a lead designer who taught me so much about exploring multiple options. I used this case as an opportunity to coach him on how to coach others to work in the way he did.

I had the lead work with his teammates and show them how to frame solution exploration through the customer and business needs. We worked on chunking out the different points in the journey where we needed to explain something or instill confidence.

I facilitated sessions where the team generated dozens of different ways to solve the problem. We visualized the different solutions in Figma and shared why certain designs worked better than others. I encouraged the lead to take charge of delivering feedback to help him develop this critical skill.

Some leadership decisions I made during this phase:

• I intentionally used this moment to coach one of my employees on a stretch opportunity
• I helped break up the journey so the team could know the whole of what we're solving and focus on the details at specific points
• I joined in the solution creation and fostered an environment where I didn't let my ideas "win" just because I am a manager

Evaluate and iterate

I shared the design concepts with our product, engineering, and business partners. We iterated on the designs based on feasibility and business viability risks. I made sure the team understood the underlying opportunities that were behind feedback from partners. The design got to a spot where internal partners were excited about the designs and ready to build.

While engineering started on some elements of the experience that we believed were lower usability risk, we tested the design with customers.

The customer feedback did indicate some usability issues with how we were communicating whether or not a 3P item was eligible for member benefits. We adjusted based on the insights. We then created the design that launched to customers.

Some leadership decisions I made during this phase:

• I made sure the team knew the feedback and the underlying reason for the feedback from our internal partners in legal, engineering, and product
• I knew that we needed rounds of customer feedback so I ensured we had a plan to iterate and test quickly
• I shared the results of every test iteration with our partners