Streamlining Grower Onboarding: Indigo Ag x John Deere
Indigo Ag, Product Manager
2021-2022
Focus Areas
Agriculture, GIS, farm management systems, data integrations
Skill Set
UX research and design, market research, user testing, data analysis, ETL, data schema development, Agile development, QA testing, launch strategy
Background
Mapping field boundaries is a crucial first steps in a grower’s journey through Indigo Ag’s Carbon program. It sets the foundation for all downstream data collection, soil carbon measurements and carbon credit generation. However, mapping fields was time-consuming, error-prone, and felt like a waste of time for growers who already had their data in other platforms. Through early user feedback and market research, we determined that integration with 3rd-party farm management systems (FMS) was necessary to accelerate onboarding, improve data accuracy, and drive positive ROI for growers.
As one of the most widely used FMSs serving over 200MM acres globally, John Deere was an easy first choice for platform integration. Over the course of 10 months, I drove product development from 0 to 1, shepherding development through a pilot phase focused on product discovery and de-risking, through scoping, development and launch of v1. We developed a UX and data architecture that enabled growers to connect their John Deere accounts with Indigo Ag, preview and select fields for import, resolve data conflicts and import finalized field boundaries for use in Carbon.
The launch was met with great success, reducing user onboarding times by 10x, contributing to an increase in overall grower enrollments by 33%, and set the foundation for further development focused on operations data import and additional third-party systems.
Permissions screen after connecting to John Deere API
Design mockup of field preview and selection
Design mockup of data conflict detection and resolution
Responsibilities
Managed user research and data science studies during Alpha pilot with 7 users managing 75k acres across 650+ fields
Utilized qualitative and quantitative insights from Alpha and market research to inform v1 scope and de-risk implementation
Partnered with design and engineering to set v1 requirements for UX and ETL pipeline
Managed development and testing across 2 engineering squads (8 engineers)
Developed multi-phase launch strategy in partnership with product marketing and sales
Results
Launched self-service integration, enabling growers to connect their John Deere accounts with Indigo Ag, preview and select fields for import, resolve data conflicts and import finalized field boundaries for use in Carbon.
Reduced average field mapping times down from hours to minutes, increasing efficiency by 10x
Monitored backlog of improvements and set UX and data schema foundation for future integrations
Instructional product demo created for self-service Help Center
Learnings
Incorporating a pilot phase with a small set of loyal users offered invaluable learning, discovery and de-risking opportunities for product development
API contract between frontend and backend teams should be agreed upon early in development to provide a smooth handoff and de-risk implementation
Extra time for QA of new features with complex data and user flows should be accounted for in timeline estimates