Bringing Virtual Reality to the business world

The infancy of the VR industry makes it difficult to predict the types of VR experiences that will resonate with people and businesses in the coming years. In addition, VR hardware and software development is a lengthy process that requires product decisions to be made months or years in advance of any opportunity for real-world feedback.

In order to define a long-term product roadmap, senior leadership within Meta’s Reality Labs division sought to understand which use cases for VR present the greatest opportunity for expanding adoption of the Quest product line among businesses.

Research question

Which business use cases for VR technology should Meta prioritise investing in over the next 5 years?

Project OutcomeS

• A discovery report analyzing the value and viability of business use cases for VR, including a 5-year product strategy proposal for developing solutions to promising use cases.

• Approval by senior leadership to align product team resourcing with the use case priorities outlined within the discovery report.

Procedure

• An 8 week discovery project was conducted in collaboration with senior stakeholders to assess and prioritise business use cases for Meta to pursue with its VR technology.

• I led a core team containing a business analyst and product strategist to conduct an 8 week discovery process.

• Weekly check-ins were held with senior leadership stakeholders to ensure our exploration of business use cases for VR aligned with Meta’s broader strategic priorities.

• Data was synthesized from a wide range of external and internal sources such as industry reports, user studies, sales data, market sizing reports and technological roadmaps.

RESULT

To structure our process, we evaluated 8 use case opportunities against 3 criteria to determine their overall merit:

1. value for users (e.g. unmet user needs, productivity benefits, adoption barriers)

2. value for customers (e.g. ROI from VR headset purchases, competitor analysis)

3. value for Meta (e.g. forecasted VR headset sales volume, total addressable market)

The results were presented to and approved by senior leadership with recommendations to focus on 2 use cases, one as a short-term adoption driver and one as a long-term growth driver as the VR industry matures.

DISCLAIMER

Due to the sensitive nature of the project, key insights and details of the work are unable to be shared publicly. Further details of Meta’s current VR business offerings can be found here.