Building Implementation Models For Large Scale Products
“To change behaviour, products must ensure the user feels in control. People must want to use the service, not feel they have to.”
― Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
We all have read and heard about great products and programs fail miserably when it comes to adoption. Similarly, a lot of govt schemes/policies/programs created and designed meticulously by experts lose their sanctity the moment they hit the ground. With India being a diverse and populous country, designing programs for scale is a hard task. But where most of these programs fail, is in their implementation. Planning and designing a robust implementation model around these products makes it a holistic program.
I’ve been working on an Edtech product meant for all states and UTs in India, which is being built and owned by a central ministry. This article will focus around the learnings of building an implementation model for the same — and hopefully will be a series based on its evolution. I will try to focus on the first level of implementation — which is at a state and leadership level.
Step 1: Figuring Usecases For Your Product
A product can mean many things to different stakeholders. The first step is to build out those scenarios (usecases) of how the product is relevant to them. Communicating relevance is one of the most critical steps in implementation design.
Defining a usecase for a state comes down to three pieces at a broader level. How does your product help amplify or complement some of the state’s priorities — which budget head does it fall under and what’s the cost per unit — what existing user habits are you tapping in to. Understanding the last bit is important.
“products that require a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail”
― Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
It is important to remember that your use case factors in some existing habit the user already has, especially if there isn’t any massive monetary benefit involved.
One of our products is digital content for teachers and students. The way we implement is physical textbooks with QR codes linked to locally produced vernacular contextualised content. This addresses the sweet spot because of three primary reasons:
- The content is targeted at specific skills that the state has prioritised for the current academic year
- Using textbooks is an existing user habit
- State has allocated funds for textbook printing and ICT infrastructure
Step 2: Building Demand and Supply
Once you have defined the product’s usecase, you know the conditions enabling it. It is pertinent at this point (before rolling out the product) to creatively think of building an active demand and supply side. The reason I mentioned ‘creative’ here because there are two big roadblocks to building demand-supply for govt. products — accountability and scale itself.
For our supply side, we created an ecosystem of content providers starting from teachers to third party organizations. To enable this ecosystem, we created a common framework that everyone can understand and keep contributing to. This is a key aspect of enabling an ecosystem.
Demand side is always a tough nut to manage, at scale. But building a community of champions for your product who lead and drive campaigns has been a big learning. We’ll talk about using data, champions and topical subjects to building effective demand in a later post.
Step 3: Building A Narrative
You’ve done quite a bit of planning by now to make the product relevant to everyone’s lives. It’s time now to release it to the world. I use the term ‘rationing of information’ when it comes to communicating your program. This doesn’t mean that you’re withholding information, but you’re not overwhelming everyone with program information, also you’re building relevant narratives.
In this post I’ve elaborated on how we went about doing the same.
These three steps are an initiation into building an implementation model from my learnings. They are rather the bare minimum. But once you hit the ground with this, there are another set of parameters to keep in mind. I will indulge on that topic as I gather more learnings.
