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M.Video (м.видео) the largest Russian consumer electronic retail chain by revenue and the first and the only publicly traded company in its market sector, listed in Moscow Exchange. Its success was mostly due to owning a large market share and operating in most regions of Russia.
M.Video’s owner Alexander Tynkovan was adamant on digital acceleration for his organisation, he had first hand experienced what digital acceleration could do for other retail giants in the west such as BestBuy, John Lewis and Amazon.
That being said he established three key relationships to propel his strategy, firstly to have a western service provider working on the branding, user experience, design and technology, secondly to have an aggressive software partner to execute the technology, and finally a business consultancy working between the two - removing any language and cultural barriers.
M.Video had a team of digital designers, product owners, business analysts, and user experience designers.
The design team was immature, unstructured and unguided, lacking a clear hierarchical structure within the team.
This was evident with the linear structure of the team sitting below product owners who were acting as creative directors or heads of user experience.
Therefore, the primary challenge I was faced with was to deconstruct the paradigms within the creative team, providing them with full autonomy, confidence, processes and structure.
I was hired as a Lead User Experience Architect, which was both hands on delivery and hands-off leadership.
Main Tasks
I guided and supported the team of onsite user experience designers with discovery for each project that we worked on. This was done to help the digital team and stakeholders gain clarity on competitors, best practice, customer needs and business limitations.
Discovery Tasks
Each project was carefully planned with the help of a project manager, everything was scoped out, prioritised and then added to a backlog. I defined a design process for mVideo that would allow the digital team to successfully deliver projects into the agile development sprints.
The issues and insight identified in the discovery phase helped shape the ideation phase that encompassed a variety of techniques.
During this phase I was either getting involved in the hands-on delivery, supporting the wider M.Video creative team or facilitating workshops.
Document
User Experience
Specifications - Click to View
Video
Prototype
Ensuring delivery was fit for purpose a series of user tests were performed.
Validation Tasks
Learnings would then get fed back into the creative team inspiring iteration to deliver a final solution to the development team. This would undergo the process in which I defined at the start of the project ensuring timely and efficient delivery.
After a project was successfully delivered and signed off, I ensured that the team would then monitor the progress of their deliverables by consumption of analytics data and business key performance indicators (KPIs). Allowing the digital team to formulate priorities and groom backlogs, as well as communicating to the business the impact on the customer's experience.
As mentioned, training was a core part of my role at M.Video. I created and provided the following training modules:
Document
Training - Creative
Fundementals - Click to View
The ability to work onsite in Russia was fantastic, not only did I thoroughly enjoy my time abroad, but I enjoyed the knowledge sharing and skill sharing with the Russian creatives.
The work done in Russia had a huge impact on mVideo's overall performance, they were immediately rewarded with record-breaking online and offline revenue and most beneficial for mVideo, the establishment of a fully autonomous digital function within their organisation.
Team
Creative Team
