Frankie Kwan – Coursera – UVA Darden

Executive Education - Learning Launches

Challenge  I am working on a project creating executive education programs for middle to  senior managers, in collaboration with business schools. We have 3 team members  and have business development budget and 6 months of time on the campaigns. We  have already several hypothesis but we need to learn about our customers and  figure our their essential needs.    Selection  We implemented methods of learning launch tool, since we don’t have sufficient  data and we are looking for innovative solutions. We want to learn through quick  tests and affordable failures.    Application  We made a simple launching site and gauged 80 target customers for a quantitive  online survey, meanwhile through our personal network we got 10 participants for  qualitative interviews. Before launching the survey and interviews, we have  internally agree on the questions, content, and metrics, and we have also made trials  with a small group of people and made optimizations before launching.    Insights  After the survey and interviews, we found 8 pain points and 5 different type of  personas among our participants. We underestimated the diversity of our target  customer group and the priority of their key problems.    Approach  We decided to first focus a specific target group of potential customers, reframed our  hypothesis, prioritize key assumptions according to value creation upon specific needs,  our execution capabilities and competitive advantage. Then we designed the test for  those assumptions and conducted the tests.

