Building TalkndHeal Shop from zero
The goal was an e-commerce experience that belonged inside the existing TalkndHeal ecosystem. Rather than starting from a feature list, I started from the journey and worked backwards to what the first version actually needed.
- Product
- TalkndHeal Shop
- Stage
- 0→1
- Role
- Product ownership
- Focus
- MVP & journeys
Starting from the consumer journey
Discovery
How does someone find a product that is relevant to them in the first place?
Evaluation
What information does a person actually need before they feel able to decide?
Purchase
How does checkout stay simple enough that nobody abandons it halfway?
Post-purchase
What has to happen after an order for the experience to feel finished?
What I owned
- Understanding the business opportunity and the consumer context around it.
- Defining the core user journeys and the experience requirements behind them.
- Identifying MVP scope and deciding what earned a place in version one.
- Writing and refining the product requirements.
- Working with design and development teams through execution.
How I drew the MVP line
The capabilities without which a user simply cannot discover, evaluate and buy. If it was not on this list, it was not blocking launch.
Genuine improvements to the experience that were not needed to validate whether the product worked at all.
Opportunities best decided once there was real behaviour to look at, rather than argued about in advance.
The hardest part of a first version is not choosing what to build. It is defending what you have chosen to leave out.
What I would do differently
I drew the MVP line from judgement about the journey, because there was no behaviour to look at yet. That was the only option available, but I would now attach a specific post-launch signal to each item pushed to Later, so revisiting it is triggered by data rather than by whoever asks most persistently.
I would also write down the assumption sitting under each P0 item. When a first version underperforms, the useful question is which assumption was wrong, and that is very hard to answer if nobody recorded them.