Design thinking tool – Learning Launch

Challenge

I am part of a small startup company that aims to identify and bring convenient services to  our customers. These services include supplying and delivering industrial cleaning chemicals  and equipment as well as providing cleaning services. The cleaning services include  professional carpet and upholstery cleaning services. Recently the company has been looking  to expand to include more services that can be directed towards households rather than the  corporate space only. The company came up with several ideas and one of the ideas that  stood out was to provide customers with laundry services. However, the company faced many  challenges with describing the financial feasibility of the idea as well as the overall value it  would bring to the customer.

Selection

In week 4 of Design thinking, Hakan Wendt mentions that the learning launch process begins  with a hypothesis or an idea. Given that the process of idea generation has already taken  place and there is an idea that the company can work with, I have selected the learning launch  tool. The learning launch tool is a quick and cost-effective way to set up and test an idea or  assumption that one has made regarding the customer. This tool allows us to make real-life  tests to validate or invalidate the idea or assumption.

Application

To begin with, we put together a team that would be part of the process. This team was  comprised of all members of the company given that the company is a small startup. The first  task of the team was to state what would have to be true, as Ed Hess puts it, for the laundry  service idea to be deemed a good idea.  The statements or assumptions made in the first task  would have to be validated in some way, so for the next task, the team set out to find data to  support these assumptions.  This was done by surveying residents of three different housing  complexes located across Johannesburg. The main question in the survey was to discover to  what extent did customers need laundry services.

After evaluating the results from the survey, the team was ready to create a prototype of the  idea that could be quickly implemented. This included installed just one heavy duty washing  machine and dryer in the three housing complexes to see how the customers take to the real- life implementation of the idea at a small scale.

Insight & Approach

The insights that we gathered from using the learning launch tool are that some of the  assumptions we made about people needing a laundry service were true and some of them  had no truth to them, they were mere speculations. For instance, we had assumed that

location was not a main concern for customers but, we found out that the location of the  laundry service was a concern for customers. We also gained insights into other factors that  we did not originally have any assumptions about. This indicated to us that perhaps we  needed to incorporate other design thinking tools to help us find out what customers want.

In the future, we plan on using the learning launch design tool along with other design  thinking tools to help us better understand the customer. A tool such as visualization could  help us better understand the customer and come up with even more innovative ideas.

