Designing Thinking for Innovation – Reflection   Page 1

Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge

I head a Sales Performance Consulting team and one of our key deliverable is enhancing the  revenue generations of our clients especially small business owners. We got a brief from a  startup furniture company who wanted to broaden their product offering by including  furniture reupholstery to their range of services. The project included developing a  marketing and sales plan that would include both digital and traditional approaches,  integrating the plan to a business model, engaging existing and prospective clients. The  challenge of this brief was the client business was set up by a grant received from an  international foundation and so it was a shoe string budget and experimentation was  limited since we only have 21 days to execution.

Selection

My team in are experienced in project management and designing customer journey maps  and I have recently been fascinated by Design thinking because it introduces an innovative   approach that brings creativity and user-centeredness to businesses. The tool we chose for  this challenge is the Learning Launch which allows us to carry out a small experiment that  will test our new idea in the real marketplace. Using the learning launch enabled us to  engage both existing and prospective customers with critical questions that would give us a  better success as we test our assumptions.

Approach

The first thing I did was run a short workshop for my team members and  the client’s team  on Design thinking Process and also discussed to understand the keys drivers for  customers  to embrace the new service, the  impacts to the organisations operations and the possible  risks involved. The workshop also enable us develop generate our assumptions, generate  our hypothesis and an operational working framework

The first thing we agreed on was set tight boundaries on key variables, such as duration,  geography, number of customers and duration. For duration we fixed 14 days been a small  business start Up,  for geography we limited it to Lagos Nigeria, Customers were limited to  25 (15 existing and 10 prospective). There was a formal communication agreement with  customers that were involved in the Learning Launch which stated the purpose and the  confidentiality of their feedback.

Designing Thinking for Innovation – Reflection   Page 2

Our Learning Launch was done in two phases, first an online survey was sent to targeted  customers, and we also took a stand at an SME Exhibition and invited targeted customers to  visit our exhibition stand.  The survey asked questions about their thoughts about  reupholstery, their preferences for reupholstery office or Home as well as what quality  standards the expected.

Application

Our application of using the Learning Launch had the following steps

First we set tight boundaries. On duration, geographical location and number of customers  we wanted to engage because we knew that having a modest budget and tight time frames  is critical to the success of the project.

Our project design had a sharp focus on key assumptions.  Our key assumption was based  on affordability. So the online survey and exhibition visit was meant to enable us generate  data. We were also on the lookout for disconfirming data which were observations that  disprove your hypotheses. These we found in both requests for individualized service and  different customer segments.

We also built a team that were both disciplined and adaptive by ensuring we were fast to  respond to feedbacks. For example once we noticed a slow response to the online survey  we created a helpdesk that called each email recipient explaining why they needed to fill the  survey, we also used the same mechanism to personally invite them to the exhibition after  email invitations had been sent, the turnout was impressive, also the orders we got made us  also focus on the operations aspect of the client by engaging the staff who were directly  involved in reupholstery services

Insights

The feedback we got in some cases was far from our assumptions. Our key assumption was  based on customers would embrace reupholstery because of its affordability but the main  concern for customers was could we guaranty quality service in terms of the products to be  used, workmanship as well as meeting agreed delivery times .    Also the response from the  online survey was low and only slightly increased when there was a follow up telephone call.  This insight changed our assumption of using just virtual approach to drive sales of this  reupholstery service but the need for individualized service. Also the high visit to the  exhibition stand and the varied questioned showed different customer segments that our  assumptions did not capture.

