Strategy, brand, product and scope, finished in the right order.

The challenge

Panoton had a clear promise and a hard build. A two-sided gig marketplace with blockchain settlement and payment gateways was a serious engineering program in 2021. The risk was the usual one: designing screens, or worse, writing requirements, before anyone agreed on who the product was for and what it had to do first.

What we did

1. Workshops before drawings

   We started with product strategy workshops to set goals, audience and differentiators, and to split objectives into now and later. The result was a plan that later choices, from branding to features, could point back to.

2. A brand built for trust

   Logo, palette, iconography and layout aimed at trust rather than novelty. Choosing where to spend your working week is a serious decision, so the navigation centered on finding and applying for work quickly.

3. Wireframes set the requirements

   We prototyped and revised flows to surface problems early. Only then did we write the technical scope for blockchain integration, payment gateways and data handling, so the scope came from a tested product rather than a wish list.

The result

Panoton received a product strategy agreed with stakeholders, a brand, a fully designed product surface and a technical scope. The project reached prototype and stopped there. There was no launch and there were no users.

The work itself has held up. Because the thinking was done in order and tested along the way, the scope is still usable.

What this means for your business

Decide what is worth building before you draw it, and draw it before you write requirements. A scope that comes out of tested designs keeps its value even if the build is paused. Doing the steps in order is cheaper than redoing them later.

This project was delivered by the Innovation Theory team, the Denver firm behind InTheory, before InTheory existed as its AI practice.