Reflection – Learning Launch

Challlange & selection

I am a consultant for a Dutch company. The company is publicly orientated and focusses on social  housing, social real-estate, local government, schools and healthcare. I work for the business unit  social housing. Our focus areas for the next two years are the Dutch energy transition and data. My  job will be to consult companies on how to make better business decisions threw mining and  analyzing data. Since this is a non-existing area within our company we have to make our clients  aware of wat we are doing. For this we are using a platform build by the business unit focusing on  local government. The platform is build to visualize for instance key performance indicators and.  My  management want me to sell this to as much as possible. We do not even know if our sector wants  what we build and pay what we are asking. For this reason I selected the Learning Launch.

According to Ed Hesse, in the video the Learning Launch, the learning launch is a method to swiftly  and cheaply test your ideas by doing small experiments.

Application

For the learning launch we decided to test our ideas rather than starting to sell the product at hand.  even though we had a proof of concept in a other market segment, we started to test our product by  talking to CEO’s and managers and validate our assumptions. After we had a good understanding of  the needs we looked for a company willing to let us build it with them and both learn from the  process. So  we started with a pilot.  The pilot contained producing a full BI platform working  according to the specifications and needs of this customer. After completing we talked to more  different CEO’s and managers to show and check if the platform build in the pilot would also fill their  needs.

Insight

The insight we gained was that, we made a assumption that our BI platform could exactly be copied  to this market segment. But the companies needs where actually different. Instead of focusing only  on budgets and policies the social housing needed more insight in in key performance/result  indicators. This was a different approach of reviewing the results.

Design thinking made me look in a different way to approach our problem at hand. I realize that I do  not have mastered all the skills yet to use design thinking and it is a learning process which will take  me some time to master. But by using the methods at hand and reflection and evaluating the  processes that have to be taken finally it will become a way of thinking and solving solutions

Approach

Next time I will start with the same tool. The way of learning and collecting a lot of data in a short  period of time is very valuable for me and our company. I also noticed that the company where we  did the pilot really appreciated it. It also gave them a lot of insights in what BI could do for their  company.

