Captain’s Log: Week 7

Our seventh week’s reflection of the DivInc Social Justice Innovation accelerator.

Recap

Our sixth week of the accelerator was all about getting back to basics. We reviewed and validated some critical early assumptions, identified two user types (searchers and sharers), and sought out critiques to refine our solution. We focused on figuring out what searchers and sharers might want during our seventh week, started giving concrete form to our idea, and received candid feedback about what is and isn’t working.

Better understanding of our users. We had a breakthrough in defining our target user that will drastically inform our solution: our users are community-oriented, mid-career types seeking practical and emotional support to manage their teams better. They are ambitious managers who know that leading has more to do with how you treat people rather than hitting deadlines.

This week, our user interviews confirmed that our target user actively seeks credible and trusted perspectives when experiencing work challenges and will quickly offer their pearls of wisdom when asked. This insight dramatically informs our customer discovery, sales pitch, and go-to-market strategy, as it’s highly correlated with the searcher and sharer archetypes we identified last week.

A wireframe is worth 1000 words. We have data showing that our solution has to be a safe space that encourages and supports vulnerability, needs to fit in a manager’s already busy schedule, and signal credibility and reputability from respondents. That data informed our wireframes, which we are using to run usability testing to validate that our product actually offers value to our archetypes.

Feedback is a gift; candid feedback is invaluable. Our mentors showed up with critical feedback we needed to prioritize what’s important. Some key takeaways:

• “It’s too conceptual”: It’s clear that we understand the problem, but need to be clearer on what our solution does to address it.
• Thanks to a lack of clarity about the connection between our past work and our current work, we have refined our founder story.
• After work-shopping our one-liner to a few folks, we now have one that we love.

Empowering ambitious mid-career managers to become more effective and inclusive leaders through crowdsourced consulting.

We love automation and efficiency. We added Sprout Social to our founder toolkit to streamline and automate our social media posts and gain better insights into our marketing efforts. Tools like this and HubSpot ease the founder’s administrivia, increases access to better data to inform our decisions, and frees us up to do other important product and data work. Reorganizing our founder time by adding a weekly data-focused meeting also made it easier to focus on our top-level goals.

What’s next

We want to be where our users are — online groups and communities. Do you know of or manage a community of practice for managers? Let’s chat.

If you haven’t shared your feedback on our concepts via survey, please do.

If you’re looking for a quicker start on how to advance DEI and achieve your business outcomes, we’d love to talk to you. Let’s do better.

You can follow our accelerator journey here on Medium or our social media accounts.

Lawrence Humphrey, Co-founder and CEO of Tech Can [Do] Better

Fallon Blossom, COO of Tech Can [Do] Better