Reflection – Learning to launch                                                                                                        Raph    Challenge   I am a member of my organization’s sales department and our challenge is to improve the sales of our  product while reducing the cost of selling the product and at the same time maintaining all forms of  marketing so our product has great exposure. The project scope includes sales department of about 50  employees and a marketing team of 10 employees, whom we co-ordinate with very often. This project is  not limited to internal resources (i.e., budget and employee time) we can find interns to work for us so that  the cost of maintaining such a fleet of employees is not high. The project shall not exceed over 100  business days and everyone should have to agree to the final solution. We are focusing on what the  customers want and their desired price point also within the interest of our key stakeholders and how to  improve our target market.    Selection  Our team has already blazed through several design thinking activities/tools, and we are ready to try the  learning launch tool. The learning launch tool is a medium of experimenting to find out the interest and the  feasibility levels of our prototype and also taking customer reviews to find out the strengths and  weaknesses of our products which helps our product improve heavily.    Application  For our first learning launch, we focused on the structure, execution and different ways of implementing  our plan of reducing costs and increasing exposure. We wanted to see if we could structure our tasks,  projects, and processes to adapt to the methods of our project management, which was quite aggressive  and clear in nature in efforts to become more agile. This tested our assumption that the structure and  execution were the main causes of our sales and workflow challenge. Our whole team went through a one- week training programme on how to adapt to the consumers and what they expect from us instead of  what we are expecting to sell them, like in the case of IBM. Then they conducted a real-world test of who  sales the most and has the most customer satisfaction and that person received incentives and we  expected to produce a document with a clear description of our new, more agile processes and sales  strategies.

For our second learning launch, we focused on gaining clarity about our sales strategies, customer  expectations, tasks and priorities. This tested our assumptions about how our prioritisation differed from  customers priorities and what was the main cause of inefficiency in the sales of the product. Then our team  completed the survey. Then a meeting was held with our stakeholders about new marketing strategies and  ways to improve our product based on the customers suggestions. The surveys included questions about our  new, proposed process, understanding the process and the prioritization of tasks, and feelings about the  change, had to be conducted within a two-week timeframe.

Insight

By applying the learning launch tool, our team identified our assumptions, ways to improve our product,  decrease the sales cost and designed launched to test these assumptions. We were calculating our expected  results, getting used to a more agile and aggressive approach of marketing and meeting the expectations of  our customers. Both our team and the stakeholders would be open to these changes and the prioritisation of  our new tasks and processes. Our actual results were slightly higher than we anticipated, the whole team and  stakeholders were ecstatic. The stakeholders were satisfied and wanted to move forward, our team will  review the insight and incorporated more efficient designs into future launch designs. The ongoing  incorporation of insight is of utmost importance at this stage, as launches come before a full rollout in the  design thinking timeline.

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Approach

Our team has already raced through several marketing strategies, design thinking and product designs and  the evolution of market through different timelines, the learning launch is a very powerful and appropriate  tool for our purpose as we were just launching our product and had to get the markets view about it. Our  team still need to grow though we have achieved good results in our first two launches and incorporate  insight into the future launch designs. Future launch designs should reflect insight gained, progress made  and come closer to a compelling solution ready for a full and fast rollout.

