Manufacturing Marketplace
Creating a direct-to-consumer platform experience.
Squad
6 engineers, 1 Engineering Lead, 1 Product Manager, Sr. UX Designer, UX Researcher
The Challenge
How do we expand our digital footprint of manufacturing into marketplace quoting?
Xometry established a manufacturing marketplace that serves as a matchmaker between buyers and suppliers. This marketplace handles complicated orders that could not be automatically quoted. Buyers can communicate directly with suppliers through this marketplace and get the quotes they need.
Discovery
Early Discovery Findings
Buyers need quick & competitive quotes. Suppliers need quality requests.
The buyer to supplier relationship is rarely linear if they are outside of the instant quoting engine.
Most of the repeat and non-linear relationships require a lot of trust between the customer and the supplier.
Before delving too far into building in this exciting new space, we had to first understand what we believe are the problems to be solved, and what are the risks of our grand idea. Through multitiudes of brainstorming sessions on 2-sided marketplaces, we landed on some common themes and areas of risk.
Building an Empowered Team
Getting the Team Aligned
As we started evolving in our discovery with the help of the research lead, and product manager - we were ready to make informed discussion on the problem space. To do this, I came up with a 7-question problem exploration strategy to align the product, ux, and engineering leads on a shared understanding of the problem space.
“Because of the nature of engineering design, you have to be in close contact with your client & communicate frequently.”
- Engineering Design Subject Matter Expert during interviews
HMW No.1
How might we create a flexible work-to-payment stream?
In order to better serve our users, we must build a system that is agnostic of the end goal, and allows for transactions to occur. If we provide quality transactional tools, suppliers will prefer our service.
HMW No.2
How might we improve the buyer & supplier collaboration?
Given that our desired audience were buyers and suppliers that required more elaborate relationships and transactional processes, we wanted to esnure that users could resolve open questions between themselves.
HMW No.3
How might we provide more value in our buyer's existing workflows?
With the new system we were trying to build, we approached the problems to be solved with how it might fit into a user's workflow. Not how a user might change or abandon their workflow to support ours.
Create the Story
Creating the 2-Sided Story
To be able to effectively create a new platform experience, we had to create a shared story of how buyers and suppliers might interact with each other on platform. The following figjam represents multiple different discussions at different points of the process. These are also the most comprehensible, others may have not made it out of my drafts to see the light of day.
Build the Testable Flows
Wireframing the Journeys
To be able to effectively create a new platform experience, we had to create a shared story of how buyers and suppliers might interact with each other on platform. The following figjam represents multiple different discussions at different points of the process. These are also the most comprehensible, others may have not made it out of my drafts to see the light of day.
The Pros:
A New Way of Working with the Xometry Network
A win for design engineers to work within the ecosystem.
Engineers were able to build quotes, sending them to offline customers. This brought new customers to transacting on platform.
Endless opportunities for integration.
As the pilot expanded to different supplier bases, we began to see connections to our finishing network from the primary Job Board.
The first collaborative user-to-user environment begins.
For the first time ever on the Xometry platform, a customer and a supplier could directly communicate online through our messaging tool.
The Cons:
Scaling and Getting to Critical Mass for Profit
Starting a 2-sided marketplace requires a lot of attention.
While the 2-sided marketplace is a needed space, it requires a lot of investment and attention to ensure key bugs are removed, and features are properly prioritized.
Ensuring a balanced supply vs. demand is costly to start.
With the initial pilot launch, operations and marketing was strained to keep up with managing the user bases we were attracting to the new platform experience.
Marketplace transactions are less effective at a small scale.
Because the transactions happening were largely directly between a customer and supplier, our profits only came from minimal transaction processing percentages.
Never be afraid to evolve your use case. Follow the users, dig deeper, find the story.
Other Experiences I've Gathered
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