Reflection - Learning Launch

Challenge:

I am a member of my organization’s innovation team. My organization is one of India’s largest  pharmaceutical companies and our challenge is to develop solutions that add value to our  stakeholders viz. doctors and patients.

India has close to 300,000 doctors out of which there are only 8000 dermatologists. Hence for the vast  majority of the populace, the access and information about a dermatologist is limited at best. As a  result, patients often end up going to a doctor who is not a qualified dermatologist increasing the  probability of misdiagnosis and poor treatment outcomes. Moreover, anecdotal evidence suggests  that by the time the patient is referred to a dermatologist, the disease condition of the patient has  deteriorated further, which could have been avoided if the patient was aware of the dermatologist in  his area. Social media and unprecedented access to information, such as peer-to-peer product and  service reviews, are giving greater power to patients, creating more informed and demanding  patients. However, doctors have a limited knowledge about how to navigate the complex digital  landscape. Unfortunately, most dermatologists do not have an online presence, and as a result, even  if a patient does search, she may not be able to find a specialized dermatologist.

We distilled this down to a problem statement of how might we partner with doctors and leverage  digital tools to ensure that the right patient reaches the right doctor at the right time.

Selection:

Our team has already gone through several design thinking activities to develop a solution for the  above problem. Hence the tool that I will be trying is the ‘learning launch’. We will try to validate the  following:

1. Stakeholder Personas:

We wanted to test the relevance and applicability of our solution amongst a target persona  what we had identified through customer immersions.

2. Current Offering & Gap Analysis (Landscape Scan):

We wanted to validate if our solution fits in the “white space” that we had identified when we  had done our primary research

Application:

For our learning launch we focused on two main criteria which we felt could make or break our  project:

1. Training of field personnel  2. Identification of the right set of customers in two cities

I will elucidate on each.

1. Training of field personnel:

Since the solution was supposed to be pitched by the sales team, it was of utmost  importance that they were clear about the value proposition of the solution. We conducted  rigorous training workshop in which learning material was handed out to the sales team.  Further, we conducted mock interviews to coach the sales team on objection handling and  gave them detailed FAQs about the features of the solution

3. Identification of the right set of customers in two cities:

We targeted the metro cities of Hyderabad and Mumbai for the learning launch since these  cities had the maximum concentration of doctors that fit our target persona. I personally  worked with the sales team to pitch our solution to the first few doctors so that we could  gauge their reaction and capture their feedback first hand.    We also identified two other cities as “control” cities in which we identified doctors with  similar persona. However, these doctors were not offered the new solution that we had  developed. All other activities for both set of doctors remained same    We wished to measure the client satisfaction score for the test vs. control doctors across  these 4 cities.

Insight:   By applying the learning launch tool, we were able to not only measure the client  satisfaction scores in test vs. control doctors to validate our assumptions, but we were also  able to identify new features which the doctors asked for and build those in.     Thus, the learning launch tool helped us not only in validating our solution but also helped in  the evolution of the product. Moving forward, the learning from the launch will be applied  to other areas as we scale this solution up to over 8000 doctors across 50 cities in India    Approach:  What I have learnt from the ‘learning launch’ is the importance of running small experiments  to validate or negate hypotheses and rapidly course correct so that one can arrive at the  ideal solution in the quickest and cheapest possible manner. I will use the learning launch  approach for other differentiated ideas that we are currently taking to market

