Design sprints done right: Chipea
Many parents are foodies who live to eat rather than just eating to live. They value good food and appreciate a wide variety of flavours. So, why do we feed our babies such a limited palate of flavours and textures? The main reason is that there’s simply not enough information about what babies can eat at any given age.
That’s why Janna, Chipea’s founder, came to us for help. She had a challenge: how can we make baby food both more exciting to eat and easier for parents to produce?
Discover the concept’s feasibility
We decided to kick off a one-week design sprint where we could start brainstorming potential solutions. The goal was to uncover insights into the concept’s feasibility, and to understand what our MVP should consist of.
The one-week design sprint went as follows.
Day 1: Market research
The first day involved market research, setting benchmarks, finetuning our design challenge, and defining a number of assumptions that we wanted to validate with the target audience.
We started by conducting a series of guerilla-style interviews with the general public to gain some quick insights into whether parents genuinely needed this type of product. Based on their responses, we began to create a customer profile, complete with their main goals and existing pain points.
Our interviews revealed that many parents lack the inspiration or time to focus on flavour learning. They already have a lot on their plate, pardon the pun. The last thing they want to do is painstakingly produce a meal that their children won’t like. Or worse still, that might upset their stomachs.
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Day 2: First product draft
Armed with consumer insights, we then completed the value proposition canvas and drafted the concept of how our product could potentially solve consumers’ pain points. Then, we started sketching a very high-level first draft of the product.
Day 3: Prototype
We decided Chipea’s concept should focus on helping time-pressured young parents introduce their children to new flavours. With this in mind, our designers set to work devising a prototype, while we also created a lean canvas to define the market fit.
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Day 4: Deciding on the next steps
On the fourth day, we summarised our findings before deciding a plan of action to tackle the next steps. For example, we decided to validate the prototype with end-users as soon as possible so that we could gain invaluable feedback from the target audience itself.
Next up: Creating an MVP
The initial week-long sprint gave us enough information to move forward to the next step: outlining the vision and defining a minimal viable product (MVP).
At this stage we had a choice to make. Janna initially wanted to create an app—but we knew that apps were incredibly expensive and time-consuming to create. Some users might be put off by having to download an app onto their phone. Many parents we interviewed also said they don’t like following recipes on their phone—so we wanted to give them the option to use any device they wanted.
Therefore, we decided the best course of action would be to build a web-based CMS platform, complete with a scalable personalisation engine. We drafted up a cost estimation and relayed this to Janna, helping to complete the business case and focusing her attention on how to proceed.
This is really all you can ask for from a design sprint. Remember: a design sprint aims to gain insights into a concept’s feasibility and discover what you should focus on when building an MVP. It’s not to build the actual product itself. Doing so obviously requires far more time, effort, planning, and resources (both financial and human) than a week-long design sprint.
However, design sprints are fantastic tools in our toolbox to flesh out ideas and get them in front of the actual user as quickly as possible.
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Continuing to develop Chipea, step by step
Having tested the concept’s feasibility and built an MVP, Chipea had a clear mission: to guide parents through their children’s food development milestones.
Chipea helps parents introduce new flavours and textures to expand their children’s culinary boundaries. Its weekly recipes and expert guidance is tailored to each baby’s age, solids experience and dietary needs.
So, with the company’s mission set in stone, we then began creating various iterations of the product over the course of the year. This allowed us to continue testing our assumptions and fine-tuning Chipea’s approach before settling upon a final product.
First, we launched an early ‘smoke screen’ version of the website, where customers could purchase a slimmed-down version of the product. We also created an online feeding guide for babies, which was a one-off purchase.
Next, we gradually developed the product into a fully personalised, subscription-based model. This version offered parents a personalised member area where they could find recipes tailored to their kids’ individual food journeys.
Even today, we’re still gradually implementing further improvements. Our goal is to make Chipea the go-to place for parents looking to feed their babies well without hassle, stress, or uncertainty.
