The Challenge

Building a two-sided marketplace for industrial buyers to work with manufacturing suppliers. This project spanned implementation across two distinct platforms, with two individual project launches.

My Role

As the embedded product designer on the project, I worked with the technical leads, product leaders, and stakeholders from conceptualization to execution. I was responsible for the discovery, design, and collaboration with the technical teams and release plans.

Defining the Objective

Expand the footprint of tech in the manufacturing industry.

While the traditional business objective of Xometry held (instant quote as much as possible) the business continued to search for a silver bullet that would solve instances where an instant quote wouldn’t work.While the business had a few hi-touch entries into a more manual approach, it was found to be unscalable for the demand of sourcing. This is where the manufacturing marketplace start to coalesce.

With a desire to solve the problems of sourcing for intricate or delicate work, the quoting marketplace took away the middle-man of Xometry. This meant that buyers could use a Xometry product that interfaces directly with a supplier, instead of the limited space of instant quoting of a CAD model.

The Discovery Channel

Because of the nature of engineering design, you have to be in close contact with your client, and communicate frequently.

– User Feedback from an Engineering Design Supplier on Platform

Once we felt assured by the research, we began building out and iterating upon our lo-fidelity experiences. We knew this would have to be a new space, with it’s own related navigation, and backend management. We also knew that users would need to be able to navigate into and away from the other primary Xometry services, such as the Instant Quoting Engine, Partner Portal, and Xometry Supplies.

Identify Opportunities

HMW No.1

How might we provide more value in our user's existing workflows?

With the new system we were trying to build, we approached the problems to be solved with how it might fit into a user's workflow. Not how a user might change or abandon their workflow to support ours.

HMW No.2

How might we improve the buyer & supplier collaboration?

Given that our desired audience were buyers and suppliers that required more elaborate relationships and transactional processes, we wanted to esnure that users could resolve open questions between themselves.

HMW No.3

How might we create a flexible work-to-payment stream?

In order to better serve our users, we must build a system that is agnostic of the end goal, and allows for transactions to occur. If we provide quality transactional tools, suppliers will prefer our servcice.

Building the Experiences

Building the Marketplace

The new experience we intended to launch coincided with updates to the core business model. To begin, we performed a soft launch and sought feedback from our early users. Once we’re able to debug our experience, we launched the Industrial Quoting on Xometry to the greater finishing and custom manufacturer audience.

Launch and Learn

Winning with finishers and engineers, endless opportunities for the negotiation process.

After launch we saw strong use from engineers and finishers to take work, respond to comments, and complete the end-to-end transaction process. Near the end of the experimental market release, we saw countless opportunities to improve the payment processing, invoicing, and contract negotiation between suppliers and potential customers.

Key pieces of this transaction, profile, and processing experience served as an inspiration for future initiatives, and has created a pure 1-to-1 user journey between a supplier and customer. A major first step for the business.

Xometry 2021

Manufacturing Marketplace

A direct transaction experience between customers and user-generated profiles for manufacturing shops, engineers, and finishers.