Mapping What Partners Actually Need
Zalando's Partner Program gives thousands of brands and retailers direct access to one of Europe's largest fashion marketplaces. The zDirect portal was their operational hub: articles, orders, marketing, fulfilment, returns, all in one place.
The UX research function was brought in late. There was existing qualitative work but no coherent picture of what partners were actually trying to achieve when they logged in. Without that foundation, there was no principled way to prioritise what to fix, build, or improve. Every team had a different answer, and none of them were grounded in evidence.
I took the project back to first principles using a Jobs to be Done framework combined with Opportunity Gap Analysis, a platform-agnostic approach that surfaces what partners are trying to accomplish, regardless of what the portal currently offers.
Handed a rough research sprint, I rebuilt the jobs list from scratch through a circular process of workshopping, reviewing, and refining.
I then ran eight stakeholder workshops across product and design teams to pressure-test and sharpen the list. Five partner workshops followed with twelve participants across five partner organisations, validating and reformulating the jobs from the partner side.
The result was 43 validated jobs fed into a Qualtrics partner survey, measuring importance and satisfaction for each. Commercial partner profile data was automatically integrated into responses to ensure representativeness and commercial relevance. Opportunity Gap scores identified where importance was high and satisfaction was low: the gaps that mattered most.
The jobs list gave the organisation something it hadn't had before: a shared, evidence-based picture of what partners were trying to achieve, built collaboratively across internal teams and validated with partners themselves.
The Opportunity Gap Analysis quantified pain points for the first time, giving product, design, and commercial teams a common language for prioritisation. The Commercial Team Lead adopted it as the formal partner voice in the product development process. The research team used it as the basis for their UX benchmarking and research roadmap. A repeat study was planned for 2023 to track progress.
The work also surfaced two structural gaps for future research: the absence of field research meant jobs partners didn't consciously articulate were likely missed; and the lack of a partner panel created friction in sampling, scheduling, and commercial relevance.
