A B2B trade marketplace for interior design — turning fragmented trade workflows into a clear, buildable MVP through AI-assisted discovery and prototyping.
Interiors Source set out to build a B2B trade marketplace for the interior design industry, with the goal of reducing fragmentation across the workflows of trade professionals, suppliers, manufacturers, and end clients.
The opportunity was not simply to "put products online." The real challenge was understanding how different parts of the trade journey could come together in one seamless platform: product discovery, pricing visibility, trade access, quoting, wishlists, project management, purchasing, payments, order tracking, and logistics.
This was a space where workflows were often relationship-driven, manual, and not deeply connected through technology. The challenge was to bring clarity to that ambiguity: understand the market, map the trade journey, define the business model, align stakeholders, and translate a broad product vision into a buildable MVP.
I led the discovery and product definition phase using an AI-first workflow that helped compress the time between research, synthesis, prototyping, and decision-making.
The first week focused on understanding the market and the user journey. I used AI tools, meeting notetakers, and LLMs to keep research, interview notes, market insights, assumptions, and decisions organized in one place — helping synthesize information faster, structure messy inputs, compare possible flows, and keep the team aligned around what we were learning.
The second week focused on AI-assisted prototyping. We built prototypes to explore and validate different user flows across the product vision — marketplace discovery, role-based access, trade professional onboarding, wishlists, pricing visibility, project-related workflows, purchasing, and logistics. This helped us see the product from start state to future state, making sharper decisions about what needed to be included now versus deferred.
A major part of my role was aligning the client and internal team around MVP scope across marketplace behavior, multiple user types, role-based permissions, pricing rules, payment flows, logistics visibility, and future project management capabilities.
The complexity came from combining several different product models into one platform. Interiors Source was part marketplace, part trade portal, part workflow tool, and eventually part project management system. Each user type had different needs, permissions, and expectations.
Another major challenge was the business model. The platform had to support different trade professional tiers, pricing visibility rules, commission logic, and purchasing flows — and these decisions directly affected the product experience, so business model alignment and MVP scoping had to happen together.
The biggest product challenge was avoiding an overloaded MVP. Because the full vision was broad, it was easy for every feature to feel important. The AI-assisted prototypes helped make trade-offs more tangible — we could see where the experience needed depth, where it could be simplified, and where the MVP needed to leave room for scale without building everything on day one.
Interiors Source moved from a broad product concept to a clear, buildable MVP scope in 2 weeks.
The discovery process aligned the client and internal team around the core marketplace experience, user roles, pricing rules, wishlist flows, purchasing logic, and logistics considerations. The result was a strong product foundation that gave design and engineering enough clarity to move into execution, while keeping the larger product vision intact.
For me, this project showed how AI-assisted discovery can help a PM move faster through ambiguity without replacing product judgment.
