Solving the Black Hair Service Conundrum
The goal of my project is to create a product or service that helps Black women in Austin book salon appointments.
Currently, Black women in America spend $7.5 Billion on beauty products annually. For hair care specifically, the industry is valued at $2.5 Billion.
Concept 1: Build — Measure — Learn (Crazy 8’s + How Might We’s)
Build-Measure-Learn is an interesting concept because it can be applied to almost anything, not just potential products. Build-Measure-Learn utilizes the scientific method to handle the uncertainty that comes with defining products and coming up with a solution. By failing fast, companies are able to test multiple features at once and determine which ideas work the best.
For this project, Build-Measure-Learn became an imperative method when conceptualizing solutions. Rather than building the actual product, running through potential solutions and then working to find their limitations and flaws with Crazy 8’s helped me to navigate through the noise and hone onto a real solution that solves the problem. Build-Measure-Learn will be a method that I use for the rest of the project as I continue to iterate through features for my solution.
Concept 2: Validated Learning (Survey + Process Mapping)
The concept of Validated Learning suggests that in order to create a viable product, researchers must ensure that they are testing a hypothesis with the right learning in mind. This idea asks that Entrepreneurs focus on the true value of a product rather than ‘vanity metrics’.
In the beginning of the project, I believe my initial hypothesis was that it’s hard to find hair stylists in Austin and that people are looking for a better way to find them. Over the course of my research, however, my hypothesis has changed with each new finding. My findings have partially validated my hypothesis but have also opened my eyes to other problems that exist around what I thought to be the core problem, so much so that I believe they must also be solved in order to create a product that is actually valuable to the customer.
This concept also helped me to curtail my premature product conceptualization because it forced me to recognize that there was more to the story. The end solution is a moving target as long as the hypothesis continues to change form. That being said, only once the hypothesis is solidified can one begin to work towards a solution.
Concept 3: The Pivot (Process Mapping)
The pivot is often one of the hardest parts of building any new product or service mainly because as Entrepreneurs and Designers we pour all of our energy into “making the thing”. Lack of testing and hypothesis exploration can lead researchers down the wrong path and thus contribute to the creation of a product that is not necessary.
In the course of my research I pivoted multiple times on various subjects. A few of those moments are as follows:
Pivot 1: Determining my Target Group — Customer Need Pivot
Deciding to target clients instead of stylist
This pivot was one out of both logic and necessity. Clients in the case of my project are Black women in Austin that want to make a hair appointment at a salon. In the beginning, I thought it would be wise to target stylists because my hypothesis alluded to the fact that they’re hard to find and thus, I believed they were both my issue and my target. However, because of their scarcity, they’re hard to study, thus making clients the natural choice because I have stable access to them.
Pivot 2: Determining Target Flow — Business Architecture Pivot
Deciding to target salon based services as opposed to home based services
One of my assumptions early on in the discovery process was that a lot of people were getting their hair done in the homes of stylists. My survey, however, showed that 81.8% of the women that I questioned were actually getting serviced in salons. People are spending their money for a specific type of setting and so I followed the money.
Pivot 3: Solutioning — Platform Pivot
Moving away from stylists directory to appointment confirmation
When I believed that the main issue was stylists were hard to find, it makes sense that I would try to create a solution that would direct people to the stylists. However, once I began to understand that the main issue was actually confirming the actually appointments (for many reasons) then I determined that a different platform — as opposed to an app or some sort of digital directory — was needed.
Concept 4: Kanban (Survey + Empathy Mapping + Pain Point Mapping)*
Kanban is a technique that was borrowed from the lean manufacturing world. With Kanban, user stories are developed to build a feature. These stories are then validated to see if they’re viable. If the story fails validation, it must be removed from the product.
Mapping pain points helped me to understand what the main issues are. From there I determined user stories and then features that pointed to the direction of a final solution. While I was aware of many of the aspects of the process that I suspected were problems, surveys and interviews helped me to reorganize and rank the problems by importance.
Bonus Concept 5: The Andon Cord & The 5 Whys
The Andon Cord was a method used by Toyota that allowed any employee in the production facilities to bring the line to a halt if there was a defect found. According to this technique, discovering a problem immediately is much more efficient. The longer a defect is in a line of production, the more costly and inconvenient it is to have it removed. Toyota’s high quality vehicles are attributed to this very method. Another method, The 5 Why’s, helps researchers get to the root cause of the real issue or job to be done.
This project is a proverbial production line — I am creating a product by building upon research over the course of a semester. Many of the concepts we worked through during class simply did not make sense to me in the very beginning. It took extra time for me to research and see examples to really understand what the goal was. I also did exercises that were adjacent to the ones we practiced in class to help me get a better understanding of these key attributes. For that reason, I put my project on pause until I could figure out the key pieces needed to begin the product formation: Target Market and Job to be Done
Ultimately, I believe this decision probably saved me from struggling for the rest of the semester. Using The Five Why’s to determine the actual root of my Job to be Done has enabled me to truly research my topic in a way that begs for exploration that will get to the root of the issue.
