2019 / Exploring opportunities in the coffee journey

The coffee ecosystem

The Project

  • Topic: Coffee bean purchasing

  • Goal: The team wanted to identify potential opportunities for support somewhere in the coffee ecosystem.

  • Strategy: The team had in mind some matchmaking service to help small farms.

 
 

Definition, knowns, and unknowns

The first step when I joined this project was to work with the team to clarify objectives and goals, both to get everyone on the same page and to better understand what was needed from me.

The next step was to pick the team’s brains:

  • What was their current understanding of a coffee bean’s journey from field to cup?

  • What were their assumptions of what happened in that journey? What were the big information gaps? What opportunities for involvement did they have in mind?

  • Who were the key actors they could name? Which of those might be target users? What did they know of the roles and responsibilities of those actors?

The effort resulted in a decision about the user type to approach first (coffee buyers), and a set of initial questions to take to them.

 

High-level view of coffee ecosystem (blurred)

Research - First iteration - Coffee Buyers

With the help of company salespeople and through my own networking efforts, I found and interviewed several people responsible for purchasing decisions at local coffee buyers. Through a combination of semi-structured interviews and task analysis, I detailed the following:

Journey of the coffee bean (blurred)

  • The field-to-cup coffee journey and the key actors involved

  • Pain points within that journey — anything that seemed particularly challenging, uncertain, or onerous

  • The key decisions that the participants made during that journey, including the variables involved — i.e., what they look for when deciding what and how much to buy, what they need to know to make that decision, how they find that information, what compromises they consider, and so on

  • Feedback on the feasibility and value of the high-level concept the team was envisioning

 

Lists of pain points (blurred)

RESEARCH - Second iteration - Coffee Roasters

Based on my findings, the team did not immediately see many opportunities for supporting coffee buyers in the manner we had hoped. However, the interviews did highlight a potential space for us with another key actor: coffee roasters.

Roaster journey (blurred)

I performed another round of interviews, similar to the first set but focusing instead on purchasing within local coffee roasters. The findings this time did highlight some small but potential areas in the roaster journey that might benefit from the kind of support the team had in mind.

I then moved on to another project as the team entered an ideation phase based on the research.

Challenges, strategies, and lessons

I wish more research efforts could have been like this one.

  • The target users, although specialized and thus relatively few in numbers, were easy to find and very accommodating with their time.

  • The subject matter concerned a pleasurable, nearly essential beverage important to many people, including myself.

  • The journey of the bean, the decisions made along the way, and the pain points involved were all complex and multivariate, providing a good challenge. But it was a challenge occurring within a relatively confined domain, making it well-suited to being defined and mapped.

All in all, it was a fun and satisfying project, relevant to people inside and outside the company.

Main lesson: Try to find more projects like this.