Qnappen: Aquaculture Management System - From Concept to a Market-Ready B2B Product

Daily communication on the fish farm – seamless across the organization.

Qnappen is part of the sustainable marine aquaculture sector. The company operates in Norway and participated in an innovation accelerator program. Qnappen’s ambition is to change how fish farming is organized and managed. The solution is currently being implemented and tested at several fish farms, with strong prospects for scaling the app to external users in the near future. We helped Qnappen take their concept from the idea stage to a successful MVP.

Challenge

The client's vision was to build a task management system that would streamline work related to sustainable aquaculture. The system was to include, among other things: management of fish farm locations with sector-specific features (such as different net mesh sizes and the number of cages), management of tasks performed at different intervals and grouped into categories, as well as a dedicated module for monitoring fish health. The application was designed for three user types: administrators, managers, and aquaculture technicians.

The scope of the project also included a new logo for Qnappen, designed by SH and aligned with Qnappen's message of simplicity and functionality.

Product Discovery

We addressed these challenges during Product Discovery workshops, which enabled us to prioritize the application's features and develop a long-term product roadmap. The meetings were held fully remotely.

During three workshops, we stepped into the shoes of future users and mapped their pain points and gains. In the ideation phase, we developed solutions addressing these needs and, most importantly, validated our assumptions through user interviews.

Scope of our work

Our mission was to create an efficient management platform that would enable managers and staff of sustainable fish farms to plan and manage work across multiple locations and communicate with each other from various devices.

Solution

Following a Lean approach, we prioritized key features for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to validate the most important assumptions identified during workshops and user testing. We decided the application would be available as a desktop app for managers and as a PWA for aquaculture technicians with limited access permissions.

We built an intuitive and visually appealing task management system to keep the app friendly and easy to use. The application is currently accessible exclusively via Microsoft authentication, which strengthens its security and ties it to the organization.

Results

The product is a web application that streamlines task management in a fish farm for both staff and their supervisors. Managers run the app on a desktop computer and have visibility into all the locations they oversee. They can create and edit locations with features that reflect the realities of fish farms, assign team members, and manage their tasks.

Aquaculture technicians working in the field open the app on a smartphone to manage their tasks and communicate with each other, including through photos. The MVP covered around 20% of the original feature list: the core needed to test key assumptions in real-world conditions. Link to the site: qnappen.no