Empowering enterprise partnerships at Indigo Ag
Lead Product Designer, Indigo Agriculture
Role and company background
Indigo provides a suite of programs that farmers can enroll in to generate additional revenue through the adoption of sustainable farming practices. Examples of these programs include: sustainably grown rice and wheat for CPG companies, or adopting practice changes to generate Carbon credits. Along with these programs, Indigo provides web apps for farmers to manage their enrollment and activities within the programs. My role was as a lead product designer working to design our partner experience.
Background
Indigo provides a suite of programs that farmers can enroll in to generate additional revenue through the adoption of sustainable farming practices. Examples of these programs include: sustainably grown rice and wheat for CPG companies, or adopting practice changes to generate Carbon credits.
For this project, I was the lead designer working with a product manager and partnering with our platform design team throughout the process.
Problem
Marketing and directly enrolling growers in Indigo’s programs is rather difficult - farmers conduct much of their business based on trust, and a tech company has to work hard to gain that trust. By conducting a few pilot programs with larger, more established agriculture companies, Indigo identified a partner strategy to allow these other companies to offer Indigo programs to their existing customer base.
Up until this point, Indigo’s software was designed exclusively for growers directly enrolling. With the addition of our partner strategy, the company needed to add an experience for the users that work for these partner organizations.
MVP Solution
Part of the reason this work got prioritized was because one of the pilot programs put together by our commercial team had far exceeded its goals in terms of the number of farmers enrolled. Our partner (let’s call them AgPartner), prides themselves on their customer relationships, and needed a way to assist their farmers through Indigo’s Carbon program.
To address this, we quickly built a simple customer list that allowed AgPartner’s customer support team to browse a list of their enrolled farmers and click a link to log them into Indigo Carbon as that farmer so the customer support person could work on their behalf.
Partner experience MVP
ITERATING FORWARD
Once we shipped this initial version to support AgPartner, we wanted to be strategic in how we added functionality to broaden the use case. I designed and facilitated a workshop to get our stakeholders aligned on the vision for partner experience, with a goal of identifying how we could iterate to support additional types of partners and programs.
I set up a Figjam board with our agenda, problem we were trying to solve, and ideation prompts for participants to generate sticky notes. Our group of 12 split into smaller groups for ideation.
I then took the sticky notes generated on the Figjam board, and led the group through a synthesis exercise. During this we found common themes and grouped the stickies accordingly.
Lastly, participants dot voted on each theme to vote on priority for what we felt like were the most important areas to address first.
Once all of the ideas were generated and summarized, there were 3 main themes identified to guide our next iterations:
Partners need the ability to see more information about farms - Our partners vary in size and scale, and while a simple list worked our initial use case, partners need CRM-like functionality to best support their farmers.
Flexibility across partner types and roles - A partner sales rep will need different information and actions than a customer support team member, although the underlying experience and data should be mostly the same.
Needs to support multiple Indigo programs - Our first use case was strictly for 1 partner using Indigo Carbon, but going forward this tool needs to support our other offerings and the ability for partners to view relevant data about their farmers across those programs.
The Indigo Partner Experience
The next version of the Indigo partner experience features a more robust table with more detailed filters and the ability to show/hide columns. Both the filters and columns can be controlled by the user or set system-defined presets based on user type/role.
When a user clicks on an individual farm, they are taken to a details page. The simplest version of this page will display basic information about the farm: contact info, location, etc. Depending on how much data the partner has about the farmer, Indigo can provide recommendations for which programs might be a good fit for that farmer.
Additionally, a secondary tabbed navigation can give program-specific insight about that farm. For instance, if a farmer participates in the Carbon program, a Carbon tab would be visible, showing details about the farmers Carbon progress.
Results / Current State
The MVP version of this tool has been in product for over a month, successfully allowing AgPartner to access their farmer's accounts. The more detailed iteration of the design is currently being scoped for production in Q1 of 2023.