Why I’m excited about joining Groupon

Today I begin a new job — VP, Global Design at Groupon. I’m thrilled for the opportunity to work on what I consider to be one of the most interesting design challenges of the Connected Age.

Now, if you’re someone who, when you think of Groupon, you think of daily deals, you probably wonder what in hell I’m talking about. And that’s going to be one of my big initial challenges. Because Groupon’s vision is to become the operating system for local commerce. Thanks to the daily deals, Groupon has relationships with hundreds of millions of shoppers, and hundreds of thousands of merchants. The objective is to activate those relationships in interesting new ways in order to reduce the friction in local commerce, to make it easier for local businesses to attract and serve customers, and for those customers to find and buy what they desire.

You could think about it as taking the kind of e-commerce intelligence found within a single site like Amazon, and figure out how to distribute it to local businesses throughout the world. To give these local businesses access to the kinds of technology and data that currently only big box or online retail has. And in a time of increasingly boarded-up shops, it’s clear local commerce could use every advantage it can get.

And, hoo-boy, what a design challenge. Across merchants and shoppers you have a remarkably complex eco-system of devices, touchpoints, desires, and processes to serve. To make this real, we will need to bring to bear every tool in the design toolkit — service design to understand end-to-end customer journeys, brand design to better communicate Groupon’s evolution, interaction design at every touchpoint, whether a shopper using the website or mobile app, or a merchant processing a payment (yep, Groupon helps merchants take payments now). Addressing this all is going to be hard, but it’s also going to be a lot of fun.

Groupon has been a punching bag for the tech and finance press the past year, but I think the company has only remarkable opportunity ahead of it. With their (our!) phenomenal growth in the past few years no other company is so embedded on both sides (shopper and merchant) of the local commerce equation. But don’t merchants hate Groupon? Given all the bad press about unhappy merchants, you might think so, but it turns out that while it makes for compelling stories that fit the media’s overarching narrative about Groupon, it’s not indicative of broader merchant sentiment (yes, that’s a link to a press release, and yes, it’s research commissioned by Groupon. For a broad and deep look at Groupon and merchants, try this article.)

What cinched the deal for me was how impressed I’ve been, up and down the line, with the people I have met, and their commitment to serving their customers with great experiences. My job is not to try to convince Groupon that it should care about its customers — they already do that. My job is to help Groupon figure out how to sustainably deliver great product and service experiences that appropriately reflect its internal passion for customers.

If this all sounds interesting to you, we’re hiring (product designers for web and mobile, visual designers), and I’d love to hear from you.