Challenge     I’m a member of sushi bar marketing department, and our challenge is to make some

changes on our menu due to increase the occupation of the restaurant during the

weekdays, more precisely at the lunch time. To help me with this mission I got all the

support from the owner to make any change which I believe that might put us back among

the best restaurants of the city as we were on our opening days last year. The results of

this project should be put on practice on the next month. So, we got around 30 days to

decide which changes we are going to do. On this context, it is important to mention that

the market of sushi restaurants has grown a lot on my city with the emergence of several

other similar restaurants. Because of that we must do something different to win back our

customers.

Selection

After all what was said and considering the short amount of time, we will have available,

we believe that the better tool to rebuild our menu and make the changes we are looking

for it will be learning launch, which can be define as an experiment meant to quickly test

an idea.

Application

For our learning launch, we focused on the rebranding of our lunch menu. First of all, we

did a little survey about the customers preferences. After that, we tried to figure out some

way to incorporate these preferences on our new model of menu. As a result of this

process, we discovered that the regular clients, those who frequent our restaurant on

weekdays when they are working, are not interested on the premium meals usually offered

by most part of the sushi bars around the city. Actually, this type of customer is looking

for something cheaper and quicker than these regular menus, which are based on “all you

can eat” model. That said, we worked on a special menu specifically for the lunch time

on weekdays. This new menu was simpler and was designed to combine our top seller

meals plus just one side dish on a smaller pocket. These changes accompanied by some

daily promotions made our menu cheaper and simpler, as well as making it easier for our

customer to not waste time.

Insight

What I have learned from this experience it was the important of a deep knowledge about

your customers before you try to put an idea into practice. And this is exactly your main

goal when you are applying the learning launch tool. For us to have the opportunity to

test a solution on the real world before we decide what to do was fundamental to our

organization measure the impacts of these changes and to reached good results too.

Additionally, we were very happy to have used some of the guidelines of design thinking

mentality, which is one of the most modern knowledge to develop ideas and apply

changes in organizations.

In the end, I would like to conclude saying that our actual results were very positive as

we’ve got an increase around thirty percent on your profits after the release of our new

lunch menu. Moving forward, our team will review this insight and incorporate it into

future launch designs.

Approach

Considering that our focus was on a quick implementation and that it would be important

to test the changes we provided, I think that the learning launch was the appropriate tool

for the situation we had faced. Despite that, I believe that there are other tools which could

be successfully applied, such as mind mapping and visualization. But in the end, I was

very satisfied with the results we got from the implementation of the learning launch tool

and all the modifications we put into practice. Future launch designs should reflect insight

gained, progress made, and acquired knowledge.

