Adam Schanfield

Designed and brought to market:
- A new product
- A new business
- A new team
- A new brand
- Through new channels

NAUTIC-ON is an innovative marine company that created the smart boating category, which is defined as:
- Maximizing your time on the water & knowing your boat is ready
- Minimizing maintenance and repair costs by preventing serious issues through advanced insight.
- Growing your boating IQ with cutting edge technology & professional industry knowledge to improve your boating experience

I designed and co-founded this business. The design portion was in the first half of 2017. We started pursuing with purpose towards the defined direction in the summer of 2017. The brand was soft-launched in December 2017, with a public launch in February 2018. The app went live on the app store in May 2018, and we were off to the races!

Through this project, the business and I won many awards:
- Innovative company to watch in the industry (2018)
- Industry top products (2019)
- I was named 40 under 40 in the marine industry (2018)

The client had a hypothesis that they could connect service providers with consumers. I led an innovation project to test and harden that hypothesis and develop a viable business model. I launched in true lean startup fashion.

1. We had a working pilot six weeks after the board approved the strategy.
2. We gained revenue before one line of software was written.
3. An MVP product was launched five months later.
4. I trained and enabled the client to manage the business on their own four months after that (at approximately the 1-year mark).
The team was to take full ownership of the opportunity at the 1-year mark.

The client was a B2B organization that had not executed formal broad customer research in 10 years. I led two small project teams to develop a mixed method (customer interviews + customer survey + employee survey) to baseline their customer experience. Then, I facilitated the ideation, prioritization, and road mapping for initiatives to improve the CX scores. After the final presentation, the client COO said, "We will win because of this."

The client had pay-per-use data services available to their B2B customer base. The problem was low comprehension and complicated accounting/payment for these services. My research highlighted the upside opportunity that simplifying access to, payment for, and use of the services would provide. We designed and implemented a subscription model that increased service adoption and revenue.

I used customer research to develop an insights-driven, customer-facing API strategy to prioritize which APIs to offer, the business case to pay for it, the technical considerations to make for the build, and the roadmap for the program.

This project was a relatively standard "top of the funnel" analysis with a goal of getting 2-3 high-level product or service innovations, one of which would go forward based on the level of customer delight and potential size.

Project highlights include two rounds of interviews - with 7-10 people in each round. The first round focused on learning the consumer and understanding their pain points and jobs to be done. The second round focused on testing a handful of different prototypes to filter the

Project schedule:
Week 1: Secondary research
Week 2: Interview, round 1
Week 3: Research analysis and insight structuring
Week 4: Hypothesis Generation and concept generation
Week 5: Interview, round 2 - hypothesis testing
Week 6: Synthesis and final results
Week 7: Wrap up, next steps, and final presentation


Key results: Three new concepts, with associated business models:
1. Social Application for a targeted market
2. A camera + video synthesis product to drive positive memories
3. A matching service to pair novice with expert participants for mentoring relationships

The social application went on to the next round of development - an MVP was built to begin to build the product line and business model

Hardware manufacturer with embedded software products as well.

Product strategy was historically based on engineering talent available and evenly spreading investment dollars by product line.

Developed a new product portfolio planning process and the first portfolio strategy.

The process included setting targets by type of project, auditing project financials, and investment.

The portfolio strategy then optimized the mix of projects based on the key criteria.

Example of my facilitation of a one-week design sprint, working with seven people in a room:

The challenge was how to provide better service in the marine industry.

Monday: Baseline knowledge - interview subject matter experts, document initial insights, and build rapport within the team; begin to source interview candidates for Friday.
Key conclusions were that maintenance and repair was a major problem.

Tuesday: Morning: Development frameworks from the insights; Afternoon: Structured ideation based on these frameworks.

Wednesday: First two hours: Finalize ideation quickly int he morning; the remaining portion of the day: rank ideas and align on approach to pursue. The team chose to pursue a "prepaid maintenance plan" that would be co-sold with dealers.

Thursday: Develop prototypes of the product. In this situation, it was brochures, pricing, and a very basic video

Friday: Interview six consumers to test their response.
Conclusion: Interest in the high-level concept, but work needed on the details of what was included, pricing, and why the value proposition worked

Overall, this was a shotgun start to what has become a profitable service that was launched six months later.

1. Recommended organization to purchase multi-million-row dataset for $50,000 to greatly increase retail market knowledge for a durable vehicle category
2. Managed a data scientist to analyze this data set by focusing on key outcomes and what we needed to learn to
3. Helped data scientist synthesize and present findings, which led to a narrowing of the company's target market