CHALLENGES

• Discover how a new reservation and ordering system will be experienced by customers

• Identify risks and constraints to delivering instant credit decisions for car buyers.

• Translate existing design system to a mobile experience

APPROACH

Discovery & Definition

Team Inception Workshop: A workshop that allows us to define our goals, guiding principles, and callout challenges we think we’ll encounter doing this work. We co-designed an approach across all the disciplines on the team (Product, Engineering, Architectural, Visual, and Experience)

• Customers would have long wait times for their credit decisions - What would we do?

• The biggest technical risks were integrating lenders across Europe and North America

• Tailoring the customer application to the various finance application formats 

Product Strategy & Delivery Cadence

We chose a dual-track implementation approach to manage the unknowns. The Delivery track would address the technical integration risks as first priority. The Discovery track would address product risks around compliance, legal, and user experience.

The technical de-risking began with a lean implementation of the Credit Application. Other areas of the purchase flow would be address afterward as they represented smaller relative risk.

Lean MVP to Shippable Product

We designed and tested a standalone version of the Finance Application. This working software performed most of the essential functions of the production application and allowed us to successfully configure a vehicle for purchase, get an accurate price, and submit a credit application to the multiple financial partner integrations.

RESULTS

We defined and delivered a large part of Ford’s vision for online reservations and ordering. A simple modular design that allowed thousands of customer to place vehicle orders everyday.