Infarm needed a strong vision and strategy for its digital operating system that would steer Infarms end-to-end autonomous agriculture operations. This vision should be a shared aspiration for the whole team building it. It was important for us to create a compelling and believable story to guide our people through why we are aiming to build this operating system long-term.
As part of a small strategic team, I was responsible for leading the strategy process of defining this holistic vision of our operating system. By conducting user research, and designing user experience & user interfaces, while also testing, and documenting the vision & strategy working closely with Product Managers and Technical Stakeholders.
Infarm’s operating system should enable a multitude of user groups to control, monitor, and optimize the farms & systems on-site and remotely, ensuring that every plant is given precisely what it needs – efficiently, sustainably, and on-demand, while supporting E2E hub production with economic viability.
Outline the future journey of how our hubs will evolve
As part of the initial research phase, we ran a remote workshop together with stakeholders from product, software & operations to define a high-level E2E hub journey and define opportunity areas to steer the vision work. We started with a status-quo map highlighting current pain points and ideating around key moments and opportunities how to solve them.
We ran a co-workshop together with product, engineering and operations to outline the current pain point and needs from a user point of view and to align all stakeholders involved.
Based on this workshop, we defined a future E2E hub journey, highlighting key moments per user group, and the prioritised opportunity areas to deep dive into within the next phase. Based on the insights gathered during the workshop but also from additional research, we created initial proto-user groups of the future to direct the concept phase.
A draft of a high-level future journey of our hub operations 3-4 years from now based on proto-user group profiles an example of an inital “how might we...” questions and opportunity space.
Drafting an initial vision through high-level concepts & validate them through concept testing sessions.
Within the concept phase, we started creating visual scenarios of the key moments selected. Based on these scenarios we then designed initial concepts as wireframes and started drafting an information architecture as well as a solution outline, and experience principles.
It was important for us to define a tangible vision as early in the process as possible and then use concept testing sessions to test and validate these concepts with end-users. Based on their input, we would iterate further on the concepts, information architecture and solution outline.
We wanted to ensure to include users early in the concept creation process and ran a series of concept testing sessions with potential power users.
Delivering a tangible vision and actionable strategy based on real user-, business- & operational needs.
Based on the wireframe concept we created some tangible, high-fidelity concepts of key screens. We also created a clickable prototype for the teams and potential users to experience the vision hands-on. Within the presentation we showcased the vision solution and explained it in detail while also highlighting the next steps needed to move towards our north star.
As a follow-up to the vision work, we started drafting a feasible 1-year from now version of our vision together with Product & Engineering, looking again at gaps to overcome and defining an ideal roadmap divided into 3 phases: now, next and future iterations.
