2020 – 2023 Program Manager of Partner Innovation Center
As an autonomous product team, you would prefer to do your own research with users. Good idea! But…how can we (as bol.com) ensure that conversations are held at a high quality level? How do you gather relevant insights? How do you prevent teams from spending too much time on the organization rather than on the content of their project?
In short:
How can we enable product teams to carry out independent, qualitative, and easy to conduct research with selling partners?
This became my research question when I started in 2020. Good to know…there was no team and no budget when I started (maybe that’s what attracted me to the challenge!). I investigated what prevents product teams from continuously engaging partners in the innovation process? I used the resulting lessons when setting up the Partner Innovation Center (PInC): a center that enables dialogue between product teams and selling partners.
Role & Activities
- Enabling our teams to easily involve our partners in every step of the innovation process;
- Making knowledge about and insights into qualitative research available through a knowledge base, e-learning, and classroom training;
- Making tools and processes available to conduct autonomous research while maintaining governance;
- Actively collaborating with research agencies, customer journey experts, and UX research.
Challenges
- How can we give teams maximum freedom in their ways of working, but keep control over quality of research?
- How can we securely share data from available partners?
- How do we measure the effect of partner participation on the feeling of partnership with bol.com?
Results 2020 – 2023
- From 0 to 3 FTE;
- From 0 euro to own budget;
- Product teams found us > 200x for intake;
- >1000 hours of conversations with selling partners;
- Product teams claim we make doing discovery easier:
- And…participating in research has a measurable positive effect on the feeling of partnership with bol.com
