Company Context

ShopFlow is a mid-market e-commerce platform serving 120,000 small and medium-sized merchants across North America. The company makes money through subscription plans and payment processing, and competes with Shopify and BigCommerce by offering simpler setup and lower total cost for growing sellers.

Problem

ShopFlow wants to launch a new Seller Insights initiative: a product area that helps merchants understand store performance and decide what actions to take next. Today, merchants can export raw reports, but only 18% of active sellers use analytics monthly. Interviews show that newer merchants feel overwhelmed by dashboards, while larger sellers want faster answers to common questions like "Why did sales drop this week?" and "Which products should I restock?"

Leadership has approved one cross-functional squad for 10 weeks. The team cannot build a full analytics suite, and there is disagreement internally: Sales wants advanced benchmarking to win larger accounts, Support wants fewer confusing reports, and Engineering wants to avoid heavy data infrastructure work in the first release.

Your task is to define the MVP for this initiative.

Deliverables

1. Identify the target user segment and the core job-to-be-done for the MVP.
2. Define what should and should not be included in the first release.
3. Explain the trade-offs behind your MVP choices, including what you would defer.
4. Propose how you would validate whether the MVP solves a meaningful user problem.
5. Define success metrics and launch criteria for the first 90 days.

Constraints

• MVP must launch within 10 weeks
• Team: 1 PM, 1 designer, 4 engineers, 1 data analyst
• No new data warehouse rebuild or ML models in MVP
• Must work for both web and mobile web, but native app changes are out of scope
• Leadership expects evidence that the initiative can improve merchant retention or plan upgrades