From a blank brief to a pitch-ready prototype

The brief

ClarityOps came to IVI with an early-stage concept: a platform to connect senior fractional executives with SMEs and startups that need leadership expertise without a full-time hire. Think of it as a two-sided marketplace: experienced leaders on one side, growing businesses on the other.

There was no existing research, no validated direction, and no clarity on which user type to prioritise first. What they had was a belief that the market existed and a timeline tied to an investor conversation. My job was to find out whether the belief held up, and if so, what the product needed to look like to serve both sides well.

Understanding the landscape first

Before talking to a single user, I needed to understand what already existed. I mapped 8 platforms operating in adjacent spaces: Upwork, Fiverr, ADPList, MentorCruise, GrowthMentor, Hubble, Topmate, and Enterprise Ireland, looking at their business models, target users, and what each one did or didn't solve.

The gap was clear: no platform combined senior executive matching with built-in accountability. Freelance platforms like Upwork skewed towards junior and mid roles. Mentorship platforms like ADPList lacked any project execution layer. The executive niche was genuinely underserved, and the Ireland and UK market had almost no localised offering. That gave the concept room to exist. But it didn't tell me how to design it.

Competitive Landscape & Research Synthesis

The research

I conducted 10 semi-structured interviews split across both sides of the marketplace: 5 with executives who had done or considered fractional work, and 5 with founders and SME leaders who had hired or tried to hire this kind of expertise.

The interviews were structured around a topic guide covering motivations, past experiences with hiring or working fractionally, what had gone wrong, what they wished existed, and what would make them trust a new platform enough to use it. I synthesised all 10 transcripts through thematic coding before drawing any conclusions.

What each side actually needed

The insight that changed everything

The most important finding wasn't about features. It was structural. Both sides of the platform, independently and in different interviews, said the same thing: vague scope is where everything breaks down.

Every competitor I had analysed started the same way: browse profiles, apply or post a listing, then negotiate scope. The problem was that by the time two parties reached a conversation, the brief was still vague. Executives were walking into engagements without clear deliverables. SMEs were hiring without knowing what success looked like.

The platform couldn't work like the others. It had to start with scope: a guided brief that turned a vague need into a Statement of Work with KPIs and milestones, before any executive was ever introduced to a client. That single structural decision changed everything downstream.

The decision that followed

Every competitor I had analysed made the same structural choice: start with profiles, then scope. The obvious solution was to do the same: build a cleaner version of what already existed. I rejected it. If scope was where every engagement broke down, the platform couldn't introduce two parties before scope existed. That meant flipping the entire flow: guided brief first, Statement of Work generated before any matching, executives only introduced to clients once both sides knew exactly what success looked like. It was a harder product to build and a harder sell to explain. But it was the only architecture that addressed the actual failure mode both sides described.

Four personas, two distinct sides

The research produced four clear personas, two on each side, each with different triggers, fears, and expectations of the platform.

Five red routes, one greyscale prototype

With the personas defined and the structural insight in place, I mapped five red routes: the critical flows that the platform had to get right for either side to trust it.

Wireframes: SME Journey & Executive Journey

The result

The greyscale prototype was delivered within the IVI Innovation Voucher timeline and went directly into the client's investor pitch deck. It wasn't used as a visual aid. It was used as evidence: proof that two distinct user groups had been interviewed, that real needs had been validated, and that a product direction existed that no current competitor had taken.

The research gave the client something more valuable than screens. It gave them a defensible product rationale: that the platform had to start with scope, not search. That was the argument they took to investors.