Leading online marketplace platform: Unifying buyer & seller experiences to drive customer-centric product strategy

24 July 2025 — 1 min read

Retail

Retail & Consumer Goods

Customer Understanding

We helped a leading online marketplace platform unify internal understanding of their buyer and seller experiences by building comprehensive journey maps using the ‘jobs to be done’ (JTBD) framework, enabling more strategic product development through shared insights and prioritisation.

Outcome 1: Established a unified set of buyer and seller journeys aligned with JTBD principles
Outcome 2: Enabled cross-functional teams to align roadmaps and prioritisation around shared customer goals
Outcome 3: Delivered visual assets and job cards easily adopted by individual teams for tactical and strategic planning

The challenge

Our client, a leading online marketplace platform, needed to unify internal understanding of their buyer and seller experiences to drive more strategic and aligned product development. To address this challenge, we partnered with their UX research team to build comprehensive buyer and seller journey maps using the JTBD framework.

We reviewed nearly 50 prior research pieces, ran in-person workshops with cross-functional teams, and conducted in-depth interviews with both buyers and sellers. The final deliverables included a universal journey map and detailed JTBD cards, empowering teams across the business to speak a common language and better prioritise improvements.

As a major online marketplace platform, our client operated within a highly complex ecosystem. Internally, different teams had created various versions of journey maps for each customer type over the years, resulting in inconsistent user understanding and fragmented decision-making. With each function referencing different journeys, collaboration was difficult and prioritisation lacked consistency.

Elixirr was brought in to support their goal of developing a shared, company-wide understanding of buyer and seller needs across the value chain.

The approach

We partnered closely with the UX research team to design a rigorous, scalable process that would consolidate the firm’s understanding of its two core customer types. Our methodology included:

Research review:

• We analysed around 50 past research studies to extract existing customer insights and build a repository of JTBD.

In-person workshops:

• These sessions engaged cross-functional stakeholders, validating early journey hypotheses and encouraging organisation-wide buy-in.

In-depth interviews:

• Conducted with both buyers and sellers to validate and refine the journeys and job lists, while capturing qualitative insights and edge cases.

Collaboration sessions:

• Co-working sessions with the client to iterate on and finalise journeys and job cards.

Visual deliverables:

• We developed high-impact visuals, including a comprehensive journey map and job cards, enabling teams to quickly apply insights to their work.

A key strength of our approach was leveraging existing research to reduce the need for redundant interviews, accelerating timelines without compromising insight quality. The workshop format also inspired excitement and engagement across the business, creating momentum for the initiative.

The value delivered

Our work provided the leading online marketplace platform with a unified language and framework to understand its customers, something they had long struggled to achieve. With the universal buyer & seller journey maps and JTBD cards now in place, teams across the business have a central resource for strategic alignment, road mapping and experience design.

The maps are expected to serve as a foundational resource for prioritisation, product innovation and tracking long-term progress against customer-centric goals.