Fish Farm Management System: From Idea to Commercial B2B Product

Everyday communication on a marine farm made trouble-free for the whole organization.

Qnappen is part of the sustainable marine agriculture industry. The company operates in Norway and took part in an innovation acceleration program. Qnappen's ambition is to change how fish farming is managed. For now, the solution is being applied and tested on a number of fish farms, with strong prospects for scaling the app to outside users in the near future. We helped Qnappen take their concept from the idea stage to a successful MVP.

The Challenge

The client's vision was a task management system that makes the work around sustainable marine agriculture more efficient. Among other things, the system had to cover: management of fish farm localities with industry-specific features (such as different grid sizes and the number of burs), management of tasks performed at different intervals and divided into categories, and a special module for checking fish health status. The app was designed to serve three types of users: Admins, Managers, and Aqua-technicians.

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

Product Discovery

We addressed these challenges during Product Discovery workshops, which let us prioritize the app's features and propose a long-term roadmap for product development. The meetings ran fully remotely.

Across 3 workshops, we empathized with future users by mapping their pains and gains. In the ideation phase, we proposed solutions to these needs and, most importantly, checked our assumptions during user interviews.

The Scope of Our Work

Our role was to create an efficient management platform that lets managers and employees of sustainable fish farms plan and manage their work across various localities, and communicate with each other on different devices.

The Solution

Using the lean approach, we prioritized the key features for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that would let us test the main assumptions defined during the workshops and user testing. We decided the app should be available as a desktop app for managers and as a PWA for aqua-technicians, with restricted permissions.

We built an intuitive, engaging task management system to keep the app user friendly and easy to work with. For now, the app is accessible only through Microsoft authorization, which keeps it safer and organization-based.

Results

The product is a web application that makes task management on a fish farm easier for both employees and their supervisors. Managers access the app on desktop and get insight into all the localities they manage. They can create and edit localities with features that reflect the actual farms, assign team members, and manage their tasks.

Aqua-technicians working on site access the app from a smartphone to manage their tasks and communicate with each other, images included. The MVP covers around 20% of the initial functionality list: the core we needed to test the main assumptions in real conditions. Here is a link to the website: qnappen.no