uplifting team and partner experiences for lyka

Lead Service Designer ∙ 2023
Research ∙ Service Design ∙ Product Strategy ∙ Team Experience

Lyka is a high-growth D2C scale-up delivering human-grade meals on subscription to dogs in Australia. 

The Lyka Partnerships team create relationships with puppy breeders, helping pregnant and nursing mothers meet their nutrition needs, and in turn ensuring weaned puppies go on to have the best fresh food.

With a period of intense growth at Lyka, the team was pushed to capacity, handling prospects and orders manually, while also extending the network and building relationships with new breeders and vets.

With 17,000 breeders in Australia, missing a litter can be costly, so we needed to swiftly improve internal workflow efficiency where we could.

Immediate focus was on improving our team experience, while also testing hypotheses to define a self-service proposition for breeders.

01 ∙ Partnerships (team) experience

  • Create a picture of current challenges

  • Prioritise uplift that can be actioned now

  • Implement, test and measure interventions

02 ∙ Breeder (customer) experience

  • Analyse existing research, identify gaps and pain points

  • Create concepts to test core features and assumptions

  • Define proposition, create roadmap to build MVP in the following quarter

Following stakeholder and team SME interviews to understand our challenge, we facilitated requirements-gathering and alignment workshops to further refine our understanding of project objectives and scope.

Team experience
DISCOVERY & ANALYSIS

UPLIFT APPROACH

From here, I was able to work directly with product managers and in-house specialists to automate key steps in the prospecting and commissions areas of the process.

Through concept testing with the Partnerships team and feasibility sessions early, we were able to automate a series of standard comms, while also defining where a personal touch was needed to build the relationship.

BREEDER EXPERIENCE
ANALYSIS & DEFINITION

BUILDING A BANK OF USER NEEDS

The Partnerships team had already run a series of interviews with breeders, around their business, their challenges, and the nutritional needs of their litters.

My role was to bring an experience design mindset and shape the product, refining the insights into actionable data:

  • creating a research repository in Dovetail

  • drafting a consistent tagging taxonomy

  • tagging and analysing the data for needs, behaviours and contexts

  • flagging where any gaps might need to be addressed

  • extracting the user needs into stories or feature sets

  • prioritising needs or jobs-to-be-done, sharing insights with the team

OUTCOME

Within a month of starting on the Partnerships team, 3 out of 4 internal initiatives had been actioned. An implementation plan was in place for the Breeder experience, with feature sets ready to be prioritised and drafted into a first iteration of concepts.

This work represents just less than 4 weeks in a 7-week engagement; this was planned to be six months, but unfortunately the client reassigned budgets and abruptly ended all their design contracts.

The next step from here would have been detailed task flows and prototyping, building out the experience to test with customers, and framing that testing to challenge assumptions and extract more customer needs and contexts.