REFLECTION – LEARNING LAUNCH

Suppose, I am currently working for XYZ company, which is a tech based company. So, like  any other tech company, we need to focus on newer innovations every time we launch and  market products. We need to think about new ideas to increase the practicality output from  a product and also need to keep in my mind about customer needs and expectations.

So, recently the company has decided to launch a new product in the market.  Let’s suppose  it’s a smartwatch. Now smartwatches have evolved and improved a lot in the recent years,  and to grab the market attention, like any other tech we need to bring something different  that should be functional and eye catching, which will have customer attention and  influence them to have it. So, our team has to come with new ideas about what we can  include and how we can represent the whole package.

So, here we need to use our design thinking ability, and the tool we have chosen for this project is  ‘LEARNING LAUNCH’.

Basically, through learning launch, what we need  to do is make a prototype of the product we will  launch,  that will have some of the key features and highlights of the actual product,  to let people  have an idea about what we are about to do and get their feedback on how things can improve and  what they actually expect from a product like this. So, we can have an experiment on how the  customers accepts our ideas and also can get new ideas to improve things before the final  launch,  and it will also help us get closer to our customers’ wants.

So, the first thing our team had to do was to come up with new ideas about features that can be  added to the existing products in the market and select the best one or two features that our  production team can approve. Because we need to keep in mind that production cost increase will  also make a huge jump in price and sudden price increase is disliked by customers. So, what do we

do with the remaining ideas? We keep them to ourselves because some of those can be needed to  apply if we find that customers do really need that feature for more practical outcome.

We then create a prototype of the model with the final or something near to our final design and  hold ‘early looks’ sessions as learning launch projects, and show some of the stuff we have built to  the customers and receive their feedback. In today’s world customers appreciate these kind of  interactive events where they get to know about upcoming stuff and also share their opinion and  reactions about our decisions. So, the experimentation of our ideas can give us some solid stats  about our assumptions for a certain project.

So, what an organization achieves from a learning launch is enough to give a good idea about the  importance of design thinking. Design thinking is not about coming up with a creative plan and  making it work, it is about coming up with some practical creative ideas and test to decide which one  will actually work.

Like, in the given situation our organization will get useful feedbacks from the customers. We can  find that some of the features will not be appreciated by the customer as much as some more  practical features that we may not have selected in the first phase and remains in the reserves. So,  any organization can work with their end product with the help of solid feedbacks from the  customers and work their way to make the item more practical within their limitations.

In such cases, we also need to have alternative plans as well, because if one of the strategies doesn’t  work we can have a second way ready to go. In the given situation the tool we used, LEARNING  LAUNCH, can often be expensive and much of a hassle. So, an alternative tool in this case can be  VISUALIZATION. Describing through image, videography, slides these are ways to visualize our  thoughts. What usually tech companies do to visualize their thoughts is they create images or videos  highlighting key factors of their stuff and design and make it public through different ways. Then  they keep track of how people react to their ideas and it helps them to gather important statistics on  how solid the idea looks to the customers. So VISUALIZATION can also be an effective tool  for design  thinking.

