Manifold Whitelabel

Whitelabel landing page

Read more about what this project ultimately turned into on TechCrunch (updated June 6th 2019)

Context

Manifold Whitelabel was an experimental product, launched internally to gauge whether the product could find product market fit. Whitelabel powers add-on platforms for developer tools that want to offer their user's additional features through add-on services. 

I lead the ideation and technical development of this experimental product. Deliverables included: pitched deck(s), a landing page, marketing campaigns, product screens, product roadmap, and MVP. The project was shuttled in favor of focusing on our core product.

March 1, 2018

An internal experiment…

Manifold was conducting an internal experiment: three separate ideas that had 6 weeks to validate whether it could find product market fit. I was assigned to PM to one of the lanes we dubbed, Manifold Whitelabel.

In 6 weeks, I created and executed:

  • a plan to validate Whitelabel

  • interviewed customers

  • completed a competitive analysis

  • created and refined multiple pitch decks

  • pitched Whitelabel

  • created and refined product screens

  • created a product roadmap

  • created and executed a marketing plan

  • and finally -drove to a decision on whether Manifold should pursue Whitelabel.

At the conclusion of week 6, it was clear that the market was interested in having their own marketplace, but to build out the features needed for Whitelabel to exist as its own product would be a heavy lift. Whitelabel would be a great extension of the core Manifold marketplace, 3-5 years down the line when our marketplace product is more mature.

 

Product screens

V1 screen shows our add-on platform integrated into a provider's dashboard. The evolution of V0 (next slide with blue heading) to V1 was driven by the goal of providing additional value and to reduce the feel of ads. I purposefully left  all branding from providers and focused on extending complimentary features. 

The next 2 slides show V1 vs V0 of the Manifold dashboard used to customize which add-on feature a provider might want to allowed on on their add-on platform, focused on extending features again and less on the brands. 

Lastly, you can see in the provider dashboard that providers can get insights into how the add-on platform is performing on their platform. The main difference between V1 and V0 is the ability to export the data. We heard from providers they don't want to be locked into our platform to access their data. 

A 6 week plan to validate whether Whitelabel had market interest and to determine an MVP if Manifold were to pursue.
Whitelabel landing page to drive inbound traffic.
 

Pitch deck

I went through many revisions of the pitch deck (this is V6!) to refine our message, value props, and product screens. The deck defines what Whitelabel is as a product, starting with product screens inside a made-up logging company. It then introduces value props and why you as a provider shouldn't build a marketplace on your own, and finally ends with implementation phases. 

 

Impact Chart

Impact chart used to determine the lift of each feature and the amount of impact we believe it would have. As you can see, at the minimum Whitelabel needed to build out both features in the upper right quadrants to be a viable product (impact and effort are gauged off of customer interviews and tech lead advisement). Both features would be multi-quarter projects that we think will be high impact, but won't know for sure until we release to the market. After weighing this with the amount of interest we have and other on-going product efforts, the project was shuttled. 

Product Roadmap.jpg

Product Roadmap

I create a goal oriented product roadmap to loosely predict the time it would take to complete building Whitelabel. Ultimately we decided not to pursue, including it for completeness. 

Read more about what this project ultimately turned into on TechCrunch (updated June 6th 2019).

Design and illustrations done by @megthesmith