Vruti Chokshi
SMB Grocery
shopping experience
PROJECT EXAMPLE
FROM VISA 2024
OBJECTIVE:
Our merchant client sought to understand the motivations and shopping behaviors of grocery store SMB customers in order to drive innovation and develop a shopping experience that more effectively meets their needs and enhances customer satisfaction.
Our objective was to conduct a competitive analysis and qualitative interviews with business owners to identify best-in-class shopping experiences and areas of opportunity.
TEAM:
Product Lead (me), Sr. Director (oversight), SMB SME (inform), Merchant Lead (inform), Strategy Analyst, Design Director, Staff Designer
MY ROLE:
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Project Planning & Cross-Functional Coordination
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Client Communication & Relationship Management
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Competitive & Market Analysis
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Narrative Development & Presentation Structuring
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User Research & Insight Synthesis
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Workshop Design, Facilitation & Outcomes Mapping
DELIVERABLES:
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Competitive Analysis Report outlining table stakes and best-in-class experiences
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User Research with 15 Small Business Owners, resulting in 3 Key Personas
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In-Person 2-Hour Ideation Session with External Stakeholders
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Final Recommendations Deck with Prioritized Concepts
APPROACH:
o1 Competitive Analysis
Conducted a competitive analysis of peers and industry leaders to identify best-in-class experiences, table stakes, key differentiators, gaps in the market, user expectations, and innovative features. Assessed product offerings, pricing models, customer engagement strategies, and overall value propositions to create strategic hypotheses.
Created detailed one-pagers for each peer, highlighting best-in-class experiences and unique value propositions. These one-pagers provided a clear snapshot of industry benchmarks, helping to identify opportunities for differentiation.
o2 User research & Personas
We conducted one-on-one interviews to gain a deeper understanding of small business owners' needs, behaviors, and pain points, ensuring our client's shopping experience aligned with their expectations. This method allowed us to have in-depth conversations, uncovering nuanced pain points and motivations that might not surface in broader surveys or other research methods.
From this research, we developed guiding frameworks and personas that defined the target customer, providing clarity on who to focus on and helping the client tailor their offerings to better serve their audience.
Research findings informed strategic frameworks that outlined how customers make decisions, helping to structure and simplify complex behaviors into clear, actionable insights.
These frameworks were essential in analysis, providing a structured approach to understanding customer motivations, pain points, and decision-making processes.
The full synthesis report captured detailed findings across key insights and culminated in three distinct personas, each representing a unique segment of the target customer base.
03 Ideation workshop
Facilitated a 2-hr ideation workshop with stakeholders to review research findings and collaboratively generate ideas. We used the personas and frameworks as a starting place for ideation. Together, we generated +130 ideas to enable opportunities for our merchant client to drive deeper engagement with their SMB customers. Conducing the session in-person fostered real-time collaboration, encouraged dynamic brainstorming, and allowed for immediate feedback and alignment.
04 Final strategic recommendations
In our final recommendations report to the client, we synthesized all the ideas and distilled them into five key opportunity areas. For each opportunity area, we provided a detailed overview and created one-pagers for the top ideas we believed the merchant client should pursue. These one-pagers outlined the potential impact on SMB customers and the client, key considerations, and suggested next steps to guide implementation.
