Captain’s Log: Week 9
Our ninth week’s reflection of the DivInc Social Justice Innovation accelerator.
Recap
Our eighth week of the accelerator was all about putting it all together. We focused on applying what we know about our users and the problem we’re trying to solve in preparation for pitch day on April 21. During our ninth week, we focused on clearly articulating our understanding of what we’ve learned, our solution, its value propositions, and the pitch that binds it all.
Solving for clarity. This week we prioritized user interviews to test how our new landing page, value propositions, and wireframes were resonating. When talking with users this week, it was evident that various portions of our landing page and product — our value propositions and some of our features — were unclear. It was surprising that users were interested in seeing more of our perspective on effective leadership at the outset, feedback that we prioritized when iterating on our landing page design.
Refining our narrative. As pitch day is quickly approaching, we received the gift of feedback around the lack of clarity in our narrative. We were reminded that it’s important to be intentional with words and that showing is always better than saying. Parsing through and prioritizing data and feedback is key to building and selling a product with the right solution to the right problem, but it’s not easy. One of our mentors, Michael Barnes, gave us solid advice this week on how to approach that,
Follow your heart and trust your ability to read this journey line.
Being good founders is essential to us as entrepreneurs, but more importantly as people — we didn’t have a playbook for leadership and are determined to build one.
Our biggest learnings from the ninth week are:
It was time to pivot. Tech Can [Do] Better got us here, and we realized that having a product increases the probability of achieving our mission of a more inclusive and equitable workforce. Until we have the resources to maintain the work done under the Tech Can [Do] Better umbrella, we’ll shift to our product organization.
Today, we officially introduce you to Pearl, a platform to help managers with their hardest leadership challenges. It is a crowdsourced leadership consulting platform where growth-minded leaders can access on-demand wisdom from trusted sources and share their expertise.
What’s next
Check out our new landing page, ask us questions, and share with your peers who are hungry to grow as a leader. Let’s do better, y’all.
If you’re looking to create, find, and share solutions for human challenges at work with a community, let’s talk.
You can follow our accelerator journey here on Medium or our social media accounts.
Lawrence Humphrey, Co-founder and CEO of Pearl
Fallon Blossom, Co-founder and COO of Pearl
