← workcase № 01 · 2020
Alimarket — a marketplace for the corner store.
role
Senior Product Designer
team
Alicorp · product, design & eng
platforms
iOS · Android
timeline
3 months to MVP · 2020
01 · context
Alicorp is Peru's largest consumer-goods company — founded in 1956, present across Latin America. In 2020 it began its digital transformation, and then the pandemic broke the supply chain. With salespeople grounded by a strict national quarantine, a store owner had to wait up to seven working days for a visit, then two or three more to receive stock. Shelves went empty.
02 · problem
Three things were true at the same time.
i.
A broken supply line
Orders depended on a salesperson visiting in person. Under quarantine that was impossible — owners waited 7+ days for stock that often never arrived.
ii.
Non-digital users
Our users were shop owners aged 50–60 with little digital habit. Anything we built had to be simple, short, and familiar — or it would not be used.
iii.
Rules we could not break
The solution had to keep owners off the street and inside the government's quarantine rules, while relieving the company's collapsing sales.
03 · approach
Make the order pass digital — without asking a 60-year-old to become digital.
01
Discovery
Interviewed shop owners to understand their day, their business, and how the pandemic was hurting them. Mapped four user types by behaviour.
02
Segment
Split users by level of digitalisation and entrepreneurial mindset. Most were parents providing for a family — experienced buyers, hesitant with screens.
03
Define the MVP
A week-long sprint with the product team set the architecture and core flow: replace the salesperson visit, show live stock, order any time of day.
04
Test & ship
Low-fi screens benchmarked against apps users already knew, then remote usability tests over Zoom. Acceptance was high — users completed tasks unprompted. Built the first design system with the UI team and launched.
"If we want a non-digital user to go digital, the product has to disappear behind the task."
— design principle № 1
04 · solution
05 · results
Numbers that beat the plan.
3 mo
From kickoff to live MVP
half the six-month goal
32.8k
Total sales through the channel
first months post-launch
+7%
Increase in order requests
first 6 months
+14%
Products added via recommendations
first 6 months
06 · what i learned
- 01Designing for everyone is not a slogan. Accessibility and plain, short steps decide whether a non-digital user ever comes back.
- 02Metrics are part of the craft. Knowing what to measure shaped the product as much as any screen.
- 03Constraints can be a gift. The quarantine rules forced the simplest possible product — and that simplicity was the win.