Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge

My organization deals with the production of plantain flour. Plantain flour is a staple food, where  plantain fruits are dried, grinded into flour and taken as meal. This flour can be used to replace a lot of  meals for people with certain ailments and generally anyone interested in having a change of diet. The  challenge is finding a way to get the plantain flour packs to the market, not just getting it to the market  only but having a high demand from customers. Aside running advertisement, a lot still felt out of place.  Majorly, my objective is to capitalize on the health sector by providing plantain flour for people who due  to their ailment (diabetes, hemorrhoids, low immune system and many more). This project will require  the company’s resources with a maximum schedule of 2 months to uncover what we need to know  about our potential customers and our product.

Tool Selection

Naturally what comes to mind is to understand who my customers are and how my product brings  something different and effective to them. My team and I had to engage ourselves with a few customers  applying the Learning Launch tool to understand generally what our customers true need in other to  work hand in hand to solve this.

Application

Firstly, with the idea of having this alternative product delivered into the hands of people who fall into  the category as mentioned, my team and I only had what we know and needed more data as to why our  product is fit for distribution. We sought to find out what we don’t know, by finding out possible places  where we can find a good number of customers to interview and test our products. As such was the  case, we came up with Health centre’s, Hospitals, shopping malls and the local market. We decided  about 50 potential customers from different background and health conditions be interviewed and  given the product to try out. During the interviews, customers basic information like name, Age, Weight,  Height, Body Mass Index, Contact Information were taken, we got to find out their day to day schedule,  social life and how they maintain their health. Getting this information also came with the opportunity  of educating each and everyone of them on the benefits of plantain flour and this caught their interest.

This led to our second learning launch, this led to regrouping and understanding what exactly we were  dealing with. At this stage we were clear on what our audience of 50 potential customers needed. We  were able to track down the causes of each of their ailments be it natural causes or lifestyle causes; all  this information was sorted out.

Insight

Our assumptions were identified and we went into action to test these assumptions. Basically, we  understood from our interaction that most of the potential customers had little or no idea about the  importance and usefulness of plantain, while some knew but would rather not go through the stress of  having to prepare the plantain flour for themselves. Next thing was to propose the idea of giving out the  product for trial and get results in the span of a month. On getting results from our potential customers  we took new data and compared to the initial data which we found considerable desired results and  customer satisfaction with our products. Some customers expressed concerns over some benefits which

weren’t achieved (like possible weight loss) during testing period and a few others but the team took  these concerns and will look over them with possible solutions incorporated into future launch design  processes.

Approach

The learning launch proved to be the appropriate tool, my team and I need to sit and look into the  insights gained and find possible solutions to future launch designs which should then have taken into  consideration the insights gained, what progress we were able to achieve and give a solution in order to  prepare our product for mass production and distribution.

