This IDEO/frog design-style case asks the candidate to act as project leader for Mercado Reforma, a large B2B grocery supplier in Latin America looking to expand into B2C, and to walk through how they would investigate the opportunity and bring the concept to life. Unlike a classic profitability or market-entry case, it tests design-thinking and human-centered problem solving: structuring a project plan rather than a rigid framework, generating and pressure-testing creative ideas, designing scrappy prototyping and usability tests, sizing a market from assumptions, and voicing the customer throughout. It rewards structure, creativity, business judgment, and comfort with ambiguity and co-creation.
Key Insights:
- When a client wants to enter a space “in an innovative way,” the right answer is a staged project plan built around the voice of the customer (research, synthesis, ideation, prototyping, and scaling), not a traditional revenue-and-cost framework.
- Deep user research (ethnographic observation, intercept interviews, focus groups) surfaces the real needs and frustrations, such as time-pressed urban millennials wanting accessible, convenient food, that a solution must address.
- Ideas should be validated through low-fidelity, cost-effective prototypes (cardboard storefronts, paper app mockups, facilitator-run service simulations), with each test resolving to an adapt, adopt, or abandon decision.
- Market sizing should be built transparently from assumptions (population x millennial share x penetration rate x spend), and the candidate must interrogate how sensitive the answer is to any single estimate.
- A strong recommendation weighs the largest opportunity against its risks: focusing on the highest-potential market while acknowledging that estimated penetration, smaller total population, and distribution challenges argue for prototyping across all markets before committing.