Growth Opportunities @ Gartner

2020-2021

ROLE

Product Designer


COMPANY

Gartner


TYPE

Product Design


Gartner Digital Markets encompasses four software/service review channels. I was part of the Vendor Portal team that worked on the platform where vendors manage their listings, gather valuable insights, and qualify leads.


When the pandemic happened, it slowed down many businesses, creating a bottleneck for our vendors' sales funnel. This project showcases the feature I designed that helped them find new ways to spread their budget and created 16% growth in vendor-opt ins.



TLDR


Background: Gartner Digital Markets encompasses four software/service review channels managed by a Vendor Portal platform where vendors manage their listings, gather valuable insights, and qualify leads


Problem: Vendors were halting their category bids because the pandemic limited their original category opportunities


Solution: A new feature, Growth Opportunities, presenting new categories that they could potentially be a good fit for


Result: Vendor bidding increased by 16% and the kicked off more growth-focused solutions

What happened?


The platform utilizes pay-per-click campaigns to maximize exposure and drive web-traffic to a vendor’s site. The pandemic slowed down the economy and even shut down some businesses completely. This caused campaigns to slow down on the vendor portal thus slimming down their sales funnel.


Our vendors needed to continue and generate leads. Quick. So a How Might We exercise was conducted to generate ideas and discuss the most feasible approach.

Thanks for the Recommendation


The outcome was a feature that would bring opportunities in front of them. Originally, vendors would choose their categories during onboarding or in the settings page. By utilizing space on the dashboard to recommend profile-based categories, vendors could evaluate new categories they weren't originally in. Opting into these categories could then increase exposure and allow vendors to capitalize on new avenues of prospective buyers.

Is it Worth the Risk?


There was no precedent to the pandemic. Nobody knew what was going to happen, how long it was going to last, or when things would go back to normal. All we knew was that we had to do respond to the environment. By mitigating risk, I was able to skip user research to quickly design and ship, and relied on live testing to feed the next iteration.


The first iteration was successful, but now I could do actual user research with something tangible.

A Good Designer Asks Why


After some time, I ran user interviews. Even though the feature was met with positive feedback, it uncovered questions into customers' bidding strategy. It forced me to reframe the problem as vendors were looking for more metrics to justify their decisions into opting into these opportunities.


The options couldn't be presented without giving them data to convince them to do so.


They were asking, why should they? They were asking why!


A sample of the research data that supported the new problem.

Continued Growth


The outcome of that research was a small addition of context accompanying each opportunity. By providing context, users understood how this could help their bidding strategy. This was met with even more positive feedback.


The result was a 16% increase in vendor opt-ins and allowed for more exploration into other growth opportunities within the portal by dedicating a whole page to those types of offerings.

Providing context to each opportunity.