Gardin Insights Platform
Glasshouse farming faces unique challenges, including a potential shortage of farm managers. Gardin's innovative technology serves as an extra pair of eyes on the farm, offering valuable support and assistance. Our advanced sensors work to enable a data analytics platform that continuously monitors a crop's crucial vitals. The farmer can effectively manage glasshouse operations with real-time data insights and automated alerts, even with limited staff.
The Gardin sensor enables farmers to see problems as soon as their crops are affected, days before visible signs appear. Farmers receive real-time feedback on how their crops are performing, which allows them to make incremental changes in temperature, humidity, lighting, or CO2, and to immediately measure the plants’ response.
“ Your product isn’t only your product. It’s the whole user experience, a chain that begins when someone learns about your brand for the first time and ends when your product disappears from their life … ”
— Tony Fadell
Gardin’s Customer Journey
Throughout the product and service development process, we concentrated on the entire customer journey to enhance our understanding of customer experiences. Our goal was to optimize each touchpoint, striving to create experiences that foster stronger customer relationships, increase loyalty, and improve long-term retention.
Problem Space Definition Process
In this team photo, Gardin's department leads engage in a collaborative brainstorming session focused on mapping the entire customer journey. Together, they define and refine each stage, from initial awareness through to loyalty, using established success metrics to identify needs and gaps. These design thinking sessions are crucial in developing effective strategies that align with our business goals and enhance customer engagement.
The Opportunity
Identifying a problem or finding a solution that a client is willing to pay for is not sufficient on its own. Real opportunities at Gardin arise when we align our team behind issues that meet three critical criteria simultaneously: a problem that customers face, a solution they are willing to pay for, and a market large enough to justify the investment of resources. This approach ensures that our efforts are not just about addressing any problem but focusing on those that offer real business opportunities—balancing customer needs with viable economic returns for Gardin.
Value Delivery
We structured our ideas into four major product initiatives: helping growers increase their yields, maintaining or improving crop quality to sell premium produce, reducing energy consumption, and meeting contractual obligations.
From Ideas to Roadmap
To navigate the challenges of establishing a new category with a startup new to software development, Gardin implemented a flexible Product Management Process. This process systematically evaluates and prioritizes both current and future capabilities. From a top-down approach, we used benchmarks and external data to assess what was achievable relative to our current position, determining if we were best in class. Simultaneously, from a bottom-up perspective, we used Fermi approximations to estimate potential impacts and prioritize projects accordingly.