Extract discovery insights

Product Discovery Synthesis: Q3 Interviews & Support Tickets

To: Chief Product Officer From: PM, Ordering Subject: Correcting the Q4 roadmap recommendation: Delivery & Invoice Reconciliation vs. Supplier Marketplace

Executive Summary

An initial look at last quarter’s data suggested we should build a supplier marketplace next quarter. However, a deeper analysis of our 200 support tickets and 10 customer interviews shows the marketplace signal is a mirage caused by a single vocal enterprise account.

For our core customer base of independent restaurants, the most urgent, expensive, and widespread problem is delivery tracking and invoice reconciliation—specifically handling short deliveries, substitutions, and credit notes. We should focus Q4 on fixing the post-order workflow, not building a marketplace.

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Main Findings & Strength of Evidence

#### 1. The "Supplier Marketplace" demand is heavily skewed and misunderstood * Strength of Evidence: Weak * What the data actually shows: On the surface, "Add more suppliers" is our #1 ticket category, making up 72 of 200 tickets (36%). However, 56 of those 72 tickets (78%) came from a single 14-site customer: Calder Group. The remaining 16 tickets came from just 16 unique accounts (out of 1,140 total). * The Nuance: Even Calder Group’s tickets are not requests to discover new suppliers in a marketplace. They are repeatedly asking us to onboard their existing suppliers (their meat supplier, dairy supplier, wine merchant, and Brakes) so they can centralize ordering. * Interview Context: In interviews, only 1 of 10 customers (the single-site Pizzeria) genuinely wanted a marketplace for supplier discovery and price comparison. Calder Group used the word "marketplace" to mean having all their current vendors on the platform. Two others actively dismissed the idea: the Tapas Bar expressed lukewarm interest before pivoting to paperwork pain, and the 5-site Café Group explicitly stated: "Finding suppliers isn't the problem. Knowing what actually arrived is."

#### 2. Delivery mismatches and invoice reconciliation are our largest widespread pain points * Strength of Evidence: Strong * What the data actually shows: In our interviews, 8 out of 10 customers identified post-order tracking (short deliveries, substitutions, invoice matching, and chasing credit notes) as their primary operational headache. This directly causes financial loss (e.g., the Gastropub losing ~£600/month paying for undelivered goods) and severe time waste (owners spending Sunday nights matching paper notes to invoices, or re-typing clipboard notes into Larder). * Support Ticket Alignment: In the ticket data, "Delivery didn't match order" (36 tickets across 36 unique accounts) and "Invoice reconciliation" (31 tickets across 30 unique accounts) are two halves of the exact same problem. Combined, they account for 67 tickets across 64 unique accounts—four times the unique account volume of the supplier requests (excluding Calder Group). * Specific Product Gaps: Customers are explicitly telling us where the product breaks down: * At the back door: Short deliveries aren't showing in the app (9 tickets), users don't know how to log substitutions (8 tickets), and chefs check deliveries on paper clipboards—likely exacerbated by our tablet login bug (10 tickets). * In the back office: Invoices include undelivered items (9 tickets), invoice totals don't match orders (9 tickets), users can't match invoices to orders (10 tickets), credit notes are missing (8 tickets), and accountant exports fail to show credits (10 tickets).

#### 3. Core ordering and access friction creates unnecessary noise * Strength of Evidence: Moderate (Ticket data only) * What the data actually shows: We saw 31 tickets for basic "Ordering" issues (10 duplicate orders, 11 delivery day changes, 10 cut-off time questions) and 30 for "Login and access" (10 password resets, 10 adding users, 10 tablet login failures). While unmentioned in interviews, these represent 30% of support volume and hurt day-to-day usability.

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What This Means for Q4: Recommendations

Building a two-sided supplier marketplace next quarter would be a costly misstep. It solves a problem (supplier discovery) that almost none of our customers have, based on un-deduplicated ticket data from one large account.

Instead, we should align our Q4 roadmap with our core value proposition—"track deliveries and invoices"—where our independent restaurants are bleeding time and money:

1. Build a "Goods-In" & Discrepancy Workflow (Primary Q4 Bet): * Allow kitchen staff to easily check off deliveries on mobile/tablet at the back door, logging short weights, missing items, and substitutions in real time. * Automatically flag discrepancies against the original order, adjust expected invoice totals, and track pending credit notes through to the accountant export. 2. Fix the Tablet Login Bug & Ordering UX (Quick Wins): * Fixing the tablet login issue (10 tickets) is a prerequisite for kitchen staff checking deliveries digitally instead of on clipboards. * Address duplicate order prevention and surface supplier cut-off times clearly in the UI to cut ordering support tickets. 3. Handle Calder Group Operationally, Not via a Marketplace: * Have Customer Success and Partnerships work directly with Calder Group to onboard their four requested suppliers (Brakes, meat, dairy, wine). For the broader base, improve our "request to onboard my existing supplier" intake flow so sites don't spam support.

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

Headline

The evidence points more strongly to a delivery-reconciliation problem than to a general marketplace need. Supplier coverage matters—especially to Calder Group—but the interviews suggest the bigger day-to-day pain is knowing what arrived, resolving discrepancies, and matching invoices and credits. Build toward that workflow next quarter; treat a broad marketplace as an unproven solution.

Findings and evidence

1. Receiving and invoice reconciliation are recurring operational pains. — Moderate evidence Eight of the ten interview excerpts raise delivery checking, discrepancies, invoice matching, credit notes, or the paperwork around them. Examples include paying for undelivered goods, learning about short deliveries only when the invoice arrives, and re-entering clipboard checks into Larder. Several customers describe financial impact or repeated manual work. The support export also contains tickets in both “Delivery didn’t match order” and “Invoice reconciliation.”

This is a consistent signal across the interviews, but ten excerpts cannot establish how common the problem is across Larder’s 1,140 accounts or which part of the workflow is most valuable to solve first.

2. Supplier availability is a genuine need, but the ticket count overstates its breadth. — Moderate evidence for demand; weak evidence for a marketplace “Add more suppliers” is the largest ticket category: 75 of 200 tickets. But 58 of those tickets—most of the category—come from one customer, Calder Group. The remaining 17 are from other accounts, so supplier coverage is not solely a Calder concern, but ticket volume is not evidence that most customers want a marketplace. Calder’s 14 sites and stated intent to move all ordering to Larder make its request strategically important; it is still one account.

The interviews echo that distinction: the pizzeria wants more choice and better prices, and Calder explicitly wants every supplier on-platform. But another multi-site operator says finding suppliers is not the problem, and the tapas bar says paperwork is what hurts day to day.

3. A marketplace is a proposed solution, not a validated priority. — Weak evidence The evidence supports specific supplier gaps and some appetite for choice, but does not show that customers broadly want a marketplace, what marketplace model they mean, or whether it would resolve their more frequent receiving and reconciliation problems. The draft’s conclusion goes beyond what these sources can establish.

What to build next quarter

Prioritize a focused delivery-to-invoice reconciliation improvement: make it easier to record what was received, flag shortages and substitutions against the order, and carry discrepancies through to invoice matching and credit-note tracking. Test the workflow with customers who describe these pains before committing to a larger build.

In parallel, follow up with Calder and a few other customers requesting suppliers. Assess targeted supplier onboarding or integrations for the specific suppliers they need; do not assume this requires a general-purpose marketplace. Use the quarter to measure how widespread each problem is across distinct accounts and whether improved reconciliation reduces manual work and unresolved discrepancies.