Assignment: Reflection - Learning Launch       Challenge  I work for a company that makes Telephone systems. We make top-quality equipment which is  expensive, and a we are trying to broaden our customer base by finding ways to make it more  affordable. We have designed our products in such a way that they cannot be shared, i.e. every  one of our customers needs to buy their own telephone system. It occurred to us that if we  could find a way to allow our Telephone systems to work in a shared manner, all the companies  in an office building could share the system, which would reduce costs significantly. This is  known as a multi-tenant arrangement.  Since it would take us at least 9 months to build this capability into our products, we contacted  a Korean company who had developed software that would do the job. By adding this software  to our systems, we could add the desired multi-tenant capability.  We had done some basic  tests but we did not know whether this would be a satisfactory solution for our resellers and for  our end customers. The challenge was to make sure that whatever solution we came up with  would not fail.  A word on our commercial model: we do not sell directly to the end users, we go through  resellers who buy from us. They install the systems and provide post-sales support, as well as   training on how to use them.    Selection  Of all the Design Thinking tools, the one chosen was a Learning Launch. It was the one that  would help us analyse what could happen when we made our combined product available on  the market, since we could carefully design an experiment to test the validity of the  assumptions we were making for our initiative.   In contrast to a full new-product roll-out, a learning launch is a learning experiment conducted  quickly and inexpensively to gather market-driven data to determine whether a growth idea  has enough merit to warrant detailed investigation with the commitment of further time,  people and resources.  This is exactly what we needed before we released our new product to our network of resellers.    Application  The way we applied the tool was by contacting three resellers with whom we had a close  working relationship. They had the necessary technical and commercial expertise to tell us  whether we were onto a good idea. These resellers each contacted one customer which had  expressed interest in a solution like the one we were launching.   Our sales and technical teams, together with the reseller teams, met the customers to get a  detailed understanding of their requirements.   Taking these into account, we built systems which were installed and tested at customer site.  This direct interaction with the end user allowed us to validate our primary assumption, i.e, that  incorporating the Korean company’s software onto our products resulted in a solution that was  fit for purpose. We were able to go into detailed tests and get real-time feedback from the  users themselves.

The three customers contacted were from very different segments of industry – marketing,  insurance and retail – allowing us to collect feedback from a variety of use scenarios.     Insight  Other than confirming our primary assumption, we derived a great deal of learnings from this  exercise. The direct feedback from end users helped us identify some features we hadn’t  considered, and which could make us more competitive.  The fact we involved our resellers also provided some learnings.   For example, we hadn’t considered that we would need to train our technical staff on being  able to troubleshoot problems with the Korean company’s software as they didn’t have a help  desk operating 24x7 – so far they had only sold in Korea.    One of the resellers operating abroad also pointed out we would need to offer the product in  more languages than just English to make it suitable for foreign markets.   Finally, we received useful feedback from end customers about the price they would be  prepared to pay. It turned out to be lower than what we had initially planned, and we found  out one of our competitors had launched an equivalent and cheaper product, which was   missing some important features that we were going to provide.This allowed us to fine-tune  our pricing.     Approach  A Learning Launch was the right tool as it allowed us to test our product and validate our  assumptions of what would make it successful.   We will continue using this tool, though next time we will widen the scope to include from the  start a broader set of assumptions to validate, on aspects like pricing, technical support and  marketing - not only those related to the product and its functionality, as was the case in this  Launch, and which meant we stumbled upon valuable findings in areas we hadn’t considered  initially. It would have been far better to uncover them in a planned and structured way.

