Challenge

Our company wanted to develop a medical imaging software which convert 2D CT/MRI slices to 3D  visualization. This kind of softwares are provided to the hospitals by Medical Imaging equipment  vendors and system requirements are high for such softwares due to large amount of data and 3D  visualization.  Company wanted to develop optimized version of that software for PC/laptop use.  Targeted customers are medical students, university professors and doctors.

Selection

Company is trying to create a new market and there are lot of unknowns both technical and non- technical. We have decided to do a fail fast experiment and selected learning launch tool.

Application

Marketing and Software teams brainstorm the idea and came up with the key assumptions. Together we  prioritized the assumptions. Prioritization was important because we wanted to come up with the  prototype quickly and at the same time address the high value problems. We have decided to create a  prototype to address 2 key assumptions

1. Value creation: Software we develop meet the performance expectations of the target

customers

2. Amount which target customers are willing to pay can cover company’s R&D cost and margin

expectations

Software team created a prototype with minimum and essential functionalities to address the key  assumptions. Prototype supported one image format and the important feature of 3D visualization. We  have selected one country to do the learning launch and initially there was a long list of customers for  learning launch. We have sifted the list to the people who think can best express their opinions and even  challenge the idea. Also, we didn’t want to share the idea with a large number of people due to  intellectual property concerns. We finally selected 15 people from different segments of target  customers – students, doctors and professors. We gave the prototype to them and our marketing and  software teams collected feedback from them.

Insight & Approach

Leaning launch gave us insights about customers and their expectations. Even though customers liked  the idea of a handy visualization software, some of them, especially students were not impressed with  the performance of the software. 3D visualization was consuming system resources which concerned  them. It was well received by doctors who gave additional suggestions like feature to measure body  organs. Also marketing team identified that the price expectations of students are not matching with  company’s profit margin expectations. Based on the inputs, we have decided to pivot the idea including  reassessing the customer segment.

We have limited ourselves to only one country to do the learning launch. I think we should have  included some other countries too. We took more time than expected to develop the prototype. It is  very important to get organization commitment about the resource needs of the project before we  start.

