Captain’s Log: Week 3
Our third week’s reflection in the DivInc Social Justice Innovation accelerator.
Recap
Our second week of the accelerator was all about customer discovery. We surveyed our followers, friends, and colleagues, iterated on our financial model, and met with mentors. For the third week, we left the lab — interviewed users, talked to partners at Ascension Seton and JPMorgan Chase, and learned solid advice that changed how we will approach our tasks for the rest of the accelerator.
User discovery best practices. Given our design backgrounds, we have experience making products people like, but not products people buy. Hoping to mitigate the likelihood of the latter and prepare for our growing list of user interviews, we sharpened up on our best practices.
There was a ton of helpful material to aid in this endeavor. Our top three were the Techstars’ “Understanding your customer” module, the many Steve Blank customer discovery videos, and THRV’s “Jobs-to-be-Done,” framework. These resources helped us collect quality data and identify opportunities in a crowded space.
Partner meetings. Chatting with the folks at Ascension Seton and JPMorgan Chase was enlightening. We had no expectations going in, as these were both non-tech companies. Much to our surprise, their managerial experiences were uncannily similar to those of tech managers, so we have decided to widen our user scope.
Interviews. We interviewed three design managers who have worked in agencies, startups, and retail. We began to see patterns in these conversations, which we used to refine our interview protocol, inspired a new potential framework for “good” management, and will inform our experiments this week.
Our biggest learnings from the third week are:
- “Startups are temporary organizations designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model [that solves a human problem].” We have a lot to learn, and quickly. This requires us to constantly shift focus and only prioritize what is urgent and important—based on what, and in some cases limited, data we have. Consequently, our weekly sprints are now focused on answering the most vital questions and (in)validating our most critical hypotheses for our business.
- Success is contingent on doing the right things at the right time. Much of the wisdom and muscle memory that we developed in the workforce doesn’t apply to early-stage startups. All advice is not created equal, even from trusted mentors and resources, since they can never fully understand your context. We have to marry credible wisdom with our understanding of where we are in the journey. When we’re stuck, we pick a direction to test until it breaks. Then we learn, then we pivot.
- Jobs-to-be-done can be a powerful tool in helping articulate value for disparate groups of personas. Converging on who would most benefit from our solution is an elusive problem, especially in the face of limited primary data and increasing scope. However, we’re realizing that discrete goals are something that most, if not all, managers have in common. When viewed through that lens, themes will emerge.
What’s next
Our main goal is to continue to refine our user profile, including which difficulties they are willing to take action to solve. We’ll test our jobs-to-be-done framework through interviews with a diverse set of managers. Afterwards, we’ll uncover patterns between demographics and psychographics.
We will be doubling down on identifying leadership/management SMEs. Initially, they will expedite our understanding of the issues that managers face, but will eventually push our solution to be better aligned with their needs.
Staying in customer discovery is verging on painful for us, considering we have several potential solutions that we’re giddy to mature. However, we’re accepting that becoming experts on the problem-space is the first step to understanding the solution-space.
How you can help us.
We want to talk to you if you are:
- A middle manager. Ideally, is or has experience managing more than three people. We’re not looking for independent contributors at this time.
- A leadership or management subject-matter expert. This could range from organizational psychologists, leadership researchers, or experienced management consultants.
If either of these apply to you or someone you know, please reach out.
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, our website, or our social media accounts.
Lawrence Humphrey, Co-founder and CEO of Tech Can [Do] Better
Fallon Blossom, COO of Tech Can [Do] Better
