Learning Launch

Challenge

In my organization I am responsible for the development of the “virtualization” product portfolio.  The major challenge is listening to the customer needs (through survey, direct interaction etc),  analysis of the market trends and thereby define business use cases for new product development  or feature improvement in the current product lines and approval of the same from the internal  stakeholders. As a part of use case definition, the project scope includes proof of concept,  prototyping and feasibility study. The objective is to analyse during this process apart from the  feature functionality validation is how easy the product usage workflow would be and how seamless  it can be integrated in the customer production environment.

Selection

Being part of new product development team, we are continuously using lot of design thinking tools  like storey telling (business case pitching), mind mapping (requirement elicitation process) and partly  the learning launch though experimentation of the concept and simultaneous validation against the  customer needs. Next , I am going to share the latest experience in a complex feature addition in an  existing product.

Application

The learning launch was being planned to be executed in three phases or sprint cycles of 1 week  each. The outcome of each sprint defines the next activity to be taken up.

In the first learning launch we focused on the technical feasibility of the customer requirement. In  the process of experimentation, we wanted to explore all the technical assumptions that has been  brought out during the requirement elicitation stage. With the prototype in place, the team was  quick to validate the assumptions as well as test the feature functionality. All the observations were  documented and shared with the stake holders for approval for the next stage.

While the first learning launch was focused on the validation of the assumptions and  implementation of the customer requirement, the second learning launch was focused on the  integrability of it in the existing product line. This phase of experimentation was important for the  team to test our assumptions on the scalability of the existing product architecture to support the  new feature and its impact. The experimentation results did throw some pointers on the  architectural constraints and the concerned teams were involved for suggestions and clarifications.  Once the “go green” signal were received for architectural clearance, the third learning launch was  started.

In the last learning launch, the focus was on getting feedback on the new workflow of the product.  The prototype was shared with few experts and power users for user experience and feedback that  would clear the assumptions related to the seamless integration on the customer environment. The  feedbacks were documented for the design adaptation by the production team.

Insights

A product if not meeting the customer needs will never be successful how good it might be. The  learning launch exercise gave answers to lot of assumptions with which we started the  experimentations. More importantly it threw some questions back which needed attention and  resolution and thus making the product much more usable.

Approach

For a new product development team, learning launch is an effective tool for a design thinking  process. With repeated practice and reviewing the lessons learnt the team can be more efficient  designing the learning launches and make it more effective.

