Poppy Flowers

Buying flowers without a guide

Buying wedding flowers asks people to make decisions they may not feel ready to make. What should flowers cost? Which ones suit the venue? How many will be enough, and how do you describe the look you want? A more detailed form wouldn’t necessarily help someone answer those questions.

Poppy Flowers brought thoughtbot a one-week product design sprint in October 2019 to find out whether the business was worth building. Nothing had been built yet. The week ran on thoughtbot’s published sprint method, six phases from Prepare through Test, with one other designer, a developer, the founder and her team. I was the facilitator.

Narrating the week in the open

A facilitator’s job is to be the faithful narrator of the engagement: capture what happens every day, and keep everyone on the same page. I ran the sprint out of a Notion workspace, so the whole week lived in one place the team could reach. The research, the phases and the prototype sat there, and so did every question, assumption and new learning, out in the open where anyone on the team could see them and add to them.

The workspace was part of the facilitation. Someone could revisit a finding, add context, or see which question we needed to answer next. The team could follow the reasoning as it developed, rather than receiving a finished account at the end.

Research came first: the business model, the mission, the market. Then interviews with people planning a wedding and people who had already bought wedding flowers, alongside local florists and a Google Form for the wider floral community. Sketching sessions followed, then a storyboard, and the group converged on one critical path narrow enough to prototype in the days remaining.

The path was short on purpose. Arrive at the site, choose color and style, describe the venue and the seating, receive the arrangement. We also considered what happened after delivery: someone still needed to know what to do with the flowers. The experience extended past the purchase.

The prototype made room for uncertainty. I don’t know yet was an answer to a quiz question rather than a dead end. The form asked for rough estimates instead of facts. The document it produced called itself an editable proposal, and it promised a call two months before the wedding to confirm what the day needed. Pricing was itemized down to the unit, so people could see how the proposal’s cost was built.

Those choices mattered together. Asking for an estimate was more useful if the result could still be changed. Showing a price was more useful if someone could understand what contributed to it. The prototype helped us test a way of making a decision with incomplete information.

Guidance, not more choice

We tracked seventeen assumptions on one board, each with a way to test it. The eleven about customers came back with a result and a product takeaway, and they all pointed the same way.

The customers we spoke to cared about color, style and vibe more than customizing each arrangement, and most would trade customization for a lower price. Most hadn’t seen a picture of their flowers before the day, and they hadn’t minded. More choice wasn’t the help they were asking for.

What they wanted was guidance. Every customer we spoke to wanted a knowledgeable person as their next step, including the ones on the smallest budgets, which ended the tidy theory that a small budget means someone happy to serve themselves. About half had been let down by their florist’s communication and wanted more clarity, education and transparency. The florists who earned good reviews were the ones who guided people through it.

We had built a quiz to take the florist out of the process. The week told us the florist was the point. The quiz’s job changed from replacing that conversation to preparing for it: quiz, then a mood board, then a design specialist, then a proposal you can edit. The product could help someone arrive at that conversation with a budget, a direction, and better questions to ask.

The board held assumptions about florists too, and the week didn’t need to settle them. Florists already offered these services to their own clients and could flex to meet Poppy, so courting them wasn’t the hard part. The customer side shaped the business model instead: start the conversation at Poppy, hand off to the florist one to six months out, get very good at vetting florists and at that handoff, then let the florist do their job. A board earns its keep by letting you follow new information, not by getting every row answered.

The founder heard it firsthand

Cameron Hardesty was involved throughout the week and ran some of the research sessions herself. She heard what people needed directly and helped make sense of the findings with us.

That shaped my job as facilitator. I needed to keep the questions, evidence, and decisions available to everyone as we moved through the week. We could work from findings the founder had heard herself and decide together what they meant for the business.

What the week produced

The sprint ended with a tested critical path, a prototype and a list of next steps for the business plan. Ask for the budget early and show it building as people choose. Offer ways to save money. Turn the quiz’s result into a mood board for the first conversation with a specialist. Send anything that isn’t a wedding straight to the shop. It gave the founder what she needed to make decisions.

We had spent one week making the business easier to examine. The prototype gave people something to react to; the shared record connected those reactions to decisions the founder could make. Her account years later is the outcome I can point to: the team was still using work from that week.