Challenge: Improve the “stickiness” of a pharma supply company’s customers (i.e., independent pharmacists) by investigating the development of a web-based pharmacy management toolkit.
Approach: Before the client spent millions developing a product without a clear picture of who their customers were, we pushed for a research-driven approach that would allow pharmacists to weigh in on their biggest challenges as business owners.
8 weeks
2 weeks planning & initial discovery
5 weeks cross-market research
1 week final analysis & artifact creation
2-person team
1 Designer/Researcher
1 Product Manager
Key Responsibilities
Plan & conduct primary user research
Lead focus groups & interviews across 4 geographic markets
Analyze qualitative data; distill key recommendations
1. Initial Quant Research
To get a baseline picture of which existing tools pharmacists engaged with, I attended a pharmacy supply conference and invited attendees to fill out a brief survey.
From this, we learned what kinds of technology solutions independent pharmacy owners considered vital to their operations—as well as which ones they’d never even heard of.
This formed the foundation of research design for the following phases.
2. Cross-Market Qual Research
The meat of the project: a blend of ethnographic study, in-depth interviews, and focus groups conducted across Dallas and rural Texas, Chicago, and Milwaukee.
These interactions were incredibly eye-opening. They painted a grim picture of the life of an independent pharmacist, struggling to survive vanishing margins and ever-increasing regulatory pressure, with little-to-no formal business management education.
Meanwhile, the client’s existing tools lacked any form of customer feedback loop, rapid iteration, or cohesion. There was no way to recognize or react to user needs, cementing the perception in their customers that their voices weren’t being heard.
3. Strategy and Roadmap
We came home with a mountain of qualitative data. I coded the data to a handful of prominent themes, then assembled a list of recommendations that reflected what the pharmacists had so generously shared with us.
We learned that building a toolbox of pharmacy management tools was an important goal, but that doing so according to the originally planned timeline—with a waterfall-style project structure and no user feedback loop—would cripple the product by preventing it from adapting to the constantly evolving needs of pharmacy owners.
Along with offering practical recommendations regarding what to prioritize in the toolkit, we pushed the client to adapt a radically different project funding and development structure; one that would not only serve their customers more effectively on this project, but that would fundamentally alter the role of customer needs in shaping their future product strategy.