Extract discovery insights

Product Synthesis: Customer Research & Support Ticket Analysis

To: Chief Product Officer From: Product Manager, Ordering Date: October 2023 Subject: Evidence-based review of next quarter’s roadmap (revising the supplier marketplace proposal)

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Executive Summary

Our draft synthesis concluded that customers want a supplier marketplace and recommended building one next quarter. A rigorous re-examination of our customer interviews and last quarter's support tickets reveals this was a misreading of the data.

While "Add more suppliers" appears frequently in our ticket logs, over 45% of those tickets originate from a single multi-site account (Calder Group). Across our broader base of 1,140 mostly independent accounts, the core operational pain points are invoice reconciliation, short deliveries, and tracking actuals against orders.

Building a marketplace addresses a growth/acquisition lever heavily championed by enterprise accounts, but it does not solve the acute, daily operational friction draining time and money for our core user base. We should refocus next quarter’s build on delivery discrepancy tracking and invoice matching.

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Main Findings & Evidence Strength

#### Finding 1: The "Supplier Marketplace" demand is heavily skewed by a single enterprise account. * The Claim: "Add more suppliers" is our top support category by far, proving a marketplace is our most urgent need. * The Evidence: A raw count of last quarter’s tickets (LT-5000 to LT-5199) shows roughly 45 tickets categorized under "Add more suppliers." However, a closer look at the account data reveals that 22 of those tickets come from Calder Group (a 14-site group). Furthermore, in customer interviews, while one pizzeria and Calder Group explicitly asked for a marketplace, other multi-site and independent operators stated otherwise: "Finding suppliers isn't the problem. Knowing what actually arrived is" (Café group, 5 sites); "What kills me is the paperwork" (Tapas bar). * Evidence Strength: Moderate to Weak. The support volume for suppliers is inflated by one outlier account. Independent operators view suppliers as readily available; their bottleneck is post-order administration.

#### Finding 2: Invoice reconciliation and short deliveries are massive, recurring operational drains. * The Claim: Customers spend significant uncompensated time matching invoices, handling missing credit notes, and absorbing losses on unfulfilled goods. * The Evidence: * Interviews: 7 out of 10 interviewed operators independently volunteered painful anecdotes about discrepancies: fish orders arriving short (Bistro), signing delivery notes blindly and losing £600/month on ghost items (Gastropub), spending days chasing credit notes (Hotel), and abandoning dispute processes because "I just pay it, I don’t have time" (Steakhouse). * Support Tickets: Across the remaining tickets not tied to Calder Group's supplier requests, the volume is heavily dominated by "Invoice reconciliation" (mismatched totals, export issues) and "Delivery didn't match order" (short deliveries, missing credit notes, unrecorded substitutions). * Evidence Strength: Strong. Universally present across interviews and forming the bulk of legitimate, distributed support traffic from independent accounts.

#### Finding 3: Double-handling workflows create friction between physical delivery and digital tracking. * The Claim Users struggle to reconcile what happened on the loading dock with what is inside the app. * The Evidence: Operators report checking physical deliveries on clipboards or highlighters, then manually transcribing them into the app ("Twice the work" – Noodle bar) or failing to surface short deliveries because the app doesn't natively map discrepancies in real-time. * Evidence Strength: Strong. Directly observed in multiple site interviews.

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What This Means for Next Quarter (Product Recommendations)

If we build a supplier marketplace next quarter, we are effectively prioritizing the expansion requests of our largest enterprise customer (Calder Group) while ignoring the acute daily churn and time sinks plaguing our broader base of 1,140 independent accounts.

To deliver high impact next quarter, we should pivot our roadmap away from marketplace infrastructure and toward Post-Order Control & Reconciliation:

1. Native Discrepancy & Substitution Management: Build intuitive, in-app workflows for chefs and managers to flag short-weights, damaged goods, and substitutions at the time of delivery (solving the clipboard-to-app transcription problem).
2. Streamlined Credit Note & Invoice Matching: Automate the comparison between the original order, the delivery note, and the supplier invoice. Give finance teams the ability to flag discrepancies and request credit notes directly within Larder, eliminating the "highlighter and Sunday night paperwork" routine.
3. Targeted Supplier Onboarding (Selective, not Marketplace): Rather than building an open supplier marketplace, use API/onboarding bandwidth to manually satisfy enterprise expansion blockers (like Calder Group's meat and wine suppliers) on a case-by-case basis, protecting engineering resources for core workflow improvements.

Synthesis: what customers need from Larder next (for the CPO)

Headline: The broadest and best-evidenced problem is that customers can't easily tell what actually arrived, and it costs them money and hours every week. Demand for "more suppliers" is real, but nearly all of it comes from one account. That account wants its own four suppliers connected, which is not the same as a marketplace. Next quarter we should build delivery check-in and discrepancy tracking, and handle Calder Group's request as a bounded onboarding project.

Finding 1: Delivery and invoice mismatches are the most widespread pain

Evidence: strong. It is consistent across both sources, comes from many accounts, and customers describe concrete costs.

• Tickets: "Delivery didn't match order" (34) and "Invoice reconciliation" (29) describe the same problem from two ends: ordered, received and invoiced don't line up. Together they account for 63 of 200 tickets (32%) from about 62 different accounts. By number of customers affected, this is our largest problem.
• Interviews: 8 of 10 describe it. Examples:
• About £600 lost in a month on undelivered items (gastropub).
• A finance team spending days every week chasing credit notes (hotel).
• Sunday nights reconciling invoices with a highlighter (bistro).
• Disputes with suppliers that can't be won without proof (bakery).
• Checking deliveries on a clipboard, then re-typing everything (noodle bar).
• Paying mismatched invoices because there's no time to check (steakhouse).

Finding 2: "Add more suppliers" is the top ticket category, but it is essentially one customer

Evidence: strong that the demand is concentrated; weak that there is broad demand for a marketplace.

- Calder Group's tickets: 75 tickets (37.5%) fall in this category, but 58 come from Calder Group alone. They repeatedly ask for the same four suppliers: - Brakes (15 tickets) - Their meat supplier (15) - Their dairy supplier (14) - Their wine merchant (14) They want suppliers they already use connected to Larder. They are not asking to discover new suppliers. - Everyone else: The remaining 17 tickets come from 17 accounts and are mostly generic ("Any plans for more suppliers?", "Would like more produce suppliers"). - Interviews: Only 2 of 10 clearly want this (the pizzeria and Calder). The tapas bar is lukewarm ("I suppose") and says paperwork is the real problem. The café group says outright that "finding suppliers isn't the problem."

The earlier claim that "most customers we spoke to want a marketplace" is not supported.

Finding 3: Calder is a real commercial opportunity of a specific kind

Evidence: moderate. This is one account's clear statement, untested.

• Calder has 14 sites and says it would move all its ordering to us if its suppliers were on the platform.
• We don't yet know how much of its ordering runs through Larder today or what the account is worth. We need that before sizing the effort.
• Their need is met by onboarding four named suppliers, not by building a marketplace.

Other signals

• Login and access (31 tickets) and ordering questions (31) look routine.
• One subset matters for the recommendation below: 10 tickets are "can't log in on tablet," and the tablet is where delivery check-in would happen.

Limits of this evidence

• Small interview sample. There are 10 interviews and we don't know how participants were chosen.
• One quarter of tickets. Ticket volume measures who contacts support, not who has the problem. Customers who silently pay wrong invoices, like the steakhouse, won't file tickets, so mismatch pain is probably under-counted.
• Data quality. Support staff assign the categories, and a few accounts show inconsistent site counts across tickets.
• No usage or revenue data yet. We can't weigh Calder against the long tail of smaller accounts.

What this means for next quarter

1. Build delivery check-in and discrepancy tracking. This is our core promise ("track deliveries and invoices") and is where the broad pain sits. Scope: - Check a delivery against the order at the door, on phone or tablet, replacing the clipboard and the re-typing. - Record shorts, substitutions and short weights, with a photo and timestamp to use as evidence in disputes. - Flag invoice lines that don't match what was received. - Raise credit notes and track them until they arrive. - Show credits in the accountant export (8 tickets ask for this). - Fix tablet login as part of the work.

Success measures: - Share of deliveries checked in. - £ of discrepancies recorded and credited. - Fewer tickets in the two mismatch categories. - Time spent on reconciliation, re-checked with these interviewees.

2. Treat Calder as an account project, not a platform bet. - Work with sales to confirm the account's value and how much of its ordering would move. - Then scope onboarding of the four requested suppliers. This is bounded work that doesn't require a marketplace.

3. Don't build a marketplace next quarter. - If we want to test demand, do it cheaply. Follow up with the 17 non-Calder accounts or run a fake-door test in the app. - Revisit with that data.

Synthesis for the CPO: prioritise delivery-to-invoice accuracy, not a marketplace

Recommendation: Next quarter, prioritise a lightweight workflow for recording what arrived, resolving discrepancies and tracking credits. Continue targeted supplier onboarding, but do not commit to a supplier marketplace on this evidence.

Main findings and evidence strength

1. Delivery discrepancies and reconciliation are the clearest recurring customer problem

Eight of ten interviewees describe problems spanning delivery checking, missing items, substitutions, invoice matching, disputes or paperwork. These problems have concrete consequences: the gastropub reports paying roughly £600 for undelivered goods last month; the bistro spends Sunday evening reconciling documents; the hotel’s finance team chases credits weekly. These are self-reported examples, not verified savings estimates.

The ticket export independently supports this pattern:

Delivery and reconciliation together account for 63 tickets from 62 distinct accounts. Treating them as one related workflow reveals a broader account-level signal than supplier requests.

Evidence strength: Strong evidence of a recurring problem among the customers represented, supported by both interviews and tickets. Moderate evidence for prioritising it across the customer base: ten interviews and support contacts are not representative measures of prevalence among all 1,140 accounts. We also cannot yet tell which part of the workflow offers the greatest benefit.

2. Supplier coverage matters, but ticket volume overstates the breadth of demand

“Add more suppliers” is the largest individual category, at 75 of 200 tickets. However, 58 of those 75 tickets—77%—come from Calder Group, one 14-site account, repeatedly requesting four named suppliers. The remaining 17 tickets come from 17 accounts.

That concentration matters. Repeated requests demonstrate an unresolved, potentially important need for Calder; they do not represent 58 independent customers. Calder is also larger than Larder’s typical independent restaurant account. Its commercial importance should be assessed separately rather than inferred from ticket volume.

Evidence strength: Strong evidence that Calder needs broader coverage, and credible evidence of interest from other accounts. Weak evidence that supplier expansion is the most widespread customer need.

3. Supplier coverage is not the same as a marketplace

The pizzeria explicitly wants more choice and better prices. Calder explicitly requests a marketplace, but its stated goal—ordering from every supplier in one place—could also be addressed by onboarding its existing suppliers. The tapas bar expresses only qualified interest and prioritises paperwork; the café group says finding suppliers is not the problem.

Thus, two interviewees express clear enthusiasm, not “most customers.” Most supplier tickets ask for named existing suppliers or “more suppliers”; they do not establish demand for discovery, comparison or transacting with new suppliers.

Evidence strength: Limited evidence for a marketplace specifically. The evidence does not establish likely adoption, willingness to pay or the supply-side requirements for making it useful.

What we should build next quarter

Make delivery-to-invoice accuracy the main product investment. Begin with a focused pilot covering:

• Recording actual quantities received, shortages and substitutions at delivery, without retyping clipboard records.
• Preserving a discrepancy record and supporting evidence that can be shared with suppliers.
• Showing differences between ordered, received and invoiced items, with outstanding credits tracked through resolution.

Validate the workflow with independent and small multi-site restaurants before scaling. Prioritise the smallest useful end-to-end slice rather than assuming full reconciliation automation is necessary.

Measure delivery-recording adoption, time spent reconciling, unresolved discrepancy age and credit-resolution time against pilot baselines. Validate reported financial benefits rather than extrapolating the £600 anecdote.

Keep supplier coverage as a bounded parallel effort. Assess onboarding Calder’s four requested suppliers and the associated retention or expansion opportunity. Separately test whether other restaurants primarily need existing-supplier coverage or genuinely want to discover and switch suppliers.

Reconsider a marketplace only after broader, account-level research and behavioural tests demonstrate demand beyond Calder. Continue addressing ordering and access issues, each responsible for 31 tickets; this recommendation is a prioritisation decision, not evidence that those basics are solved.