Week 5: Houston, we have a problem
Don’t worry, that’s a good thing. The best thing for our group so far, I think.
We have spent almost four weeks getting to know our target group and trying to define a problem worth solving together with them. We started with the assumption that the office environment in small tech companies is something that does not get enough attention. It turns out that for the most part is not the case, and it has greatly helped us figuring out the problem we actually want to solve.
“There is no need to rush into the solution before the original problem is clarified. Sometimes one has to travel far in order to get back.”
- Us from two weeks ago
We had a feeling that huge corporations would be different when it comes to office environments, but we didn’t really know how. We decided to interview an employee in a big multinational IT company and yes, their office environment is completely different from smaller companies. Seems like the biggest difference between them is how fellow co-workers are seen. Smaller companies tend to think of their coworkers as friends, or at least the team members seem closer to each other than in bigger companies. We decided to capitalize on that.
Instead of trying to find a problem that would be similar for a large variety of offices we chose to look for a problem that affects office entertainment from the outside. We ended up realizing, that scheduling an event like a movie night for a group of friends from the workplace is pretty much what small tech companies do when they look for entertainment outside of their office — and then we found a problem.
Finding entertainment for a group of people is hard. Checking calendars is time-consuming. Making sure your group stays up-to-date is tedious.
We decided we would figure out how to solve these issues. We started talking about concepts that would solve this, but there’s still work to before that. We want to understand how the employees look for entertainment, what kind of entertainment do they usually search for and what are the biggest problems while doing it. After figuring these things out, we’ll be able to start defining our solution to fix them.
To summarize our last week, we spent our last week by gathering more data from a small software company called Fast Monkeys and our pilot client Avoin.Systems. Finally, we managed to define our problem. We had a meeting with the technology people within our team and went through our technology skills and objectives in this project. Our business people planned the possibilities and challenges around this problem from the business perspective. We went through possible entertainment API providers, such as Finnkino and the City of Helsinki to figure out what kind of entertainment is available locally outside offices. We contacted the people from developer.ticketmaster.com and got permission to use their API. In the meeting with the business team, we talked about the main value proposition, potential target groups, customer relations and possible revenue model we should consider. Most likely we did other things as well, but this blog post is already getting long.
Our next steps?
1. Validate the problem and gain input from our pilot companies
2. Benchmark other solutions to see if this problem has already been solved
3. Put all these thoughts on paper through the value proposition canvas
4. Start considering the Business Model Canvas in order to get the supply side point-of-view as well
