
Farming Service Ideation
What type of digital service could add value to the professional life of German farmers? What do they want from the digital documentation of their fieldwork? In this strategic project, I led an innovation process to find out the answer to this question.
Task
Develop a high potential Value Proposition for a digital farming service
Target group:
German farmers
Industry:
Farming
Client:
Yara Digital Farming
Year:
2019
Services
Product Strategy
- Value Proposition Canvas
- Disruptive innovation
- Job-to-be-done
- Team workshops
- Design Planning
User Research
- Customer interviews
- Online ad testing
- Desk research
Description
Apart from their actual agricultural work, German farmers need to do a lot of work on documenting how their fields are seeded, fertilized, and treated with pesticides. How could they be helped in the best way? What kind of value could a digital service possibly bring to them?
To find this out, I suggested using the Value Proposition Canvas from the consulting firm Strategyzer, an established tool to map customer needs and ideate products and services.

Value Proposition Canvas from Strategyzer
Primary tool of the project to map customer needs and ideate services
Based on the company's existing research, service drafts were developed and validated using telephone interviews and the testing of advertisements to ensure both the addressed problem was relevant and the ideated solution was acceptable to the customer.
In the final documentation, a quotient for the probability of success was determined from the evaluations of these two criteria. Surprisingly, the results showed that the service design with the highest solution relevance received the lowest acceptance, very similar to an unpleasant but necessary activity.
A detailed article I published on the Medium platform describes the project in more detail.
Process Artefacts

Initial Customer Profile
All insights from existing research, collected and sorted by the team

Context-specific Customer Profile and Value Map
After splitting up the initial customer profile and ideating matching product ideas
Perceptual Mapping 1
Comparing challenge level and customer acceptance
Perceptual Mapping 2
Comparing potential and assumed number of competitors
Tools
Pen and paper
Miro
“Oliver demonstrated an extremely comprehensive and outstanding level of expertise, which he always used very confidently and successfully to accomplish tasks. He familiarized himself with the project within a very short time and pursued the objectives sustainably and with greatest success. He carried out all tasks independently, extremely carefully, and well-planned.”

Marcin Titikowski
Head of Product at YARA Digital Farming
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