Fixie
Fixie · Discovery, solution direction · At Razor
- Asked for
- Automate the preparation of 3D models.
- Actually
- Nobody was waiting for a model. Customers were waiting for a price.
6h → 5m
time to quote, from around six hours to under five minutes
Fixie described their problem in technical terms and asked for a technical fix. Underneath it was a human problem: customers waiting most of a working day for a quote. Reframing the work around time to quote changed what we built.
- Discovery
- Service design
- Product direction
- Client
- Fixie
- Through
- Razor
- My role
- Discovery and solution direction
- Measure
- Time to quote
A well-specified request
Fixie came to us with a clear ask: automate the preparation of 3D models. Preparing models was where the hours went, so automate that and everything speeds up. Perfectly reasonable, and a genuinely hard technical problem.
The trouble with a hard technical problem is that it's very easy to fall in love with it.
Working back from the ask
- Automate model prepThe request as it arrived
- Who's waiting?The customer, not the engineer
- Waiting for what?A price they can act on
- Redesign the quoting serviceTime to quote becomes the measure
The reframe
So we stopped treating model preparation as the problem and started treating time to quote as the problem. That moved the whole quoting service onto the table, not just the one step everyone was staring at, and we redesigned the service and platform around it.
6h → 5m