Reflection - Learning Launch

Challenge

I have recently joined an early-stage software start-up which develops software for companies  operating in the commercial real estate space. This industry is generally slow moving and certainly  does not like change. The main users are asset manager, analysts and transaction managers which  are involved in managing, selling, and buying assets. This industry itself has not seen much change  over the past decade and a lot of their processes date back a couple of years. We knew that this  industry was certainly ready for software that speeds up processes and frees up time. This industry  has been using Microsoft Excel for data entry, data storage and the sharing of data for a long time.  However, getting the end user to adopt our software solution and truly understanding what they are  looking for has been a challenging operation. We decided that using smaller learning launches  throughout the development process to test and verify assumptions will help us build a product  which truly satisfies the users needs would be the best way to approach this challenge.

Selection

Understanding what our users truly want and need to do their job more efficiently has been our core  challenge. Using smaller learning launches that test and verify assumptions has helped our team to  run experiments on a small scale which truly uncovered what our clients needed. Generally speaking,  a learning launch is a tool which uses carefully designed experiments or prototypes to test the key  underlying value-generating assumptions. The learning launch is a learning experiment conducted  quickly and inexpensively to gather customer feedback and data. The purpose of these small-scale  experiments is to learn valuable information and whether an idea is validated or not.

Application

Generally, we run small learning launches all the time as they are one of the best ways to learn more  about your end-users. During our feedback sessions with our main users, the idea of a shared  environment with key stakeholders was brought to our attention as this would result in faster  sharing of important data which ultimately helps to speed up the process of buying and selling  property. This idea assumes that the main group of users have an interest in being able to share the  clean, standardised data that is stored within their database with their key stakeholder groups  without them having direct access to that data. Our solution to this problem which we have recently  tested is providing the key stakeholders with a shared environment which contains the data provided  which has already been cleaned and standardised which means that the next entity along the value  chain does not have to run the same processes again. After an initial session in which we discussed  this idea it was important to design an initial solution to this problem and get it ready for user  feedback as fast as possible to either verify our assumptions or learn from failing early on.

Insights & Approach

Having gathered customer feedback which then helped us in creating the initial prototype has been a  valuable lesson. Testing the prototype led to a confirmation of our assumptions. Providing  professionals with this solution has led to efficiency gains of more than 90% (meaning that the time  spent on this process has been decreased by about 90-95%). Previously different key stakeholders  would use the same data to run the same analysis independently from each other which resulted in  unnecessary delays in the process of buying real estate. This new feature allows our clients to share  standardised and clean data which has already been analysed with their key stakeholders in a shared  environment.

Elon Musk has recently stated in an interview that companies should focus more on improving their  products than spending time in meetings, on PowerPoint presentation or in Excel spreadsheets.  Design Thinking is a very powerful tool which can help making products better.

