Challenge

I work for a communication company and my/our challenge is to improve and increase the portfolio  product in order to increase worldwide sales and to spend marketing budgets on the right campaigns.

The project scope consists in a new product launch and includes the R&D department, engineering  department, marketing department, and other company departments that has to work closely for many  days and months to reach the assigned target. R&D and marketing departments start from ideas and  hypothesis to improve the company product but not all of these will be considered.

Selection

Our teams, after already gone through several design thinking activities/tools like customer interview,  market research, production/sale feasibility, realized a couple of samples and are ready to try the new  product.

Application

For our first launch, we focused on the execution of in factory test to verify if the new product works and is  comply with the design thinking activities. After passed all the in factory test we are ready to present the  new product in the market, at that point, our team went through fairs and workshops, use newspaper and  press to present the new product to our historical customers and to potential new customers.

For our second launch, we gave some samples to our historical customers with the focus on test all the  functionality of the new product. The result of this stress test allowed our team to better understand if the  new product is a valid product and if it was necessary change something or implement new functionality  before the mass production.

Insight

By applying the learning launch tool, our team identified assumptions and designed launches to test these  assumptions. Additionally, we thought through anticipated results, expecting to find that these approaches  would improve our workflow, and that both our team and the key stakeholders would be fairly open to the  new prioritization of tasks and process. Our actual results were slightly different from what we anticipated:  while our team was open to the prioritization of tasks and process, the key stakeholders in the larger  marketing department expressed some concerns. Moving forward, our team reviewed these insights and  incorporate it into the mass production launch designs.

Approach

As our team has already done several design thinking activities / tools, launching learning is the appropriate  tool. As previously mentioned, our team needs to review the information gained from our first two  launches and incorporate it prior to mass production. Future launch plans should reflect the information  gained and the progress made.

