New Products and Services
Structured brainstorming to unearth opportunity.
Challenge
The increased competition requires us to generate new ideas for competing in the market.
Overview
As competition intensified in the learning and development space, I spearheaded a team dedicated to exploring innovative products and services for our organization. Conscious of our time and budget constraints, we recognized the need to take charge of building, managing, and executing any new initiatives.
Our brainstorming sessions yielded numerous ideas, and eventually, we settled on developing a recommendation system that would seamlessly connect individuals' professional goals with our content.
What truly excited me about this project was the incredible speed and agility involved in both development and testing phases. Unlike typical discussions around product development, which often entail significant resource expenditures, our approach allowed us to swiftly generate ideas, create prototypes, and roll out the service itself.
Outcome
We decided to prototype and test a simple recommendation system for matching people’s professional goals with the courses we already had in our catalog.
Using Typeform, I mapped common content and skills of courses against learning outcomes. The system worked by asking questions about the person’s experience and professional goals, then matching those goals to skills that were taught in specific courses.
Later we learned that adding two questions on familiarity with data analysis and interest in AI/ML helped to make the recommendations more accurate, so we integrated those changes and reset the link. Easy!
Process
We started by reviewing user feedback and market reports, which lead to the following conclusions.
Our pre-designed programs are not meeting the needs of the changing market.
People leave the site before enrolling because they cannot determine which course is right for them.
We best serve those who are looking to add to their knowledge or skills, as opposed to those who want to learn entirely new skills.
People love the content once they find the right fit
From these statements, we brainstormed ideas and tested them using the Big Idea framework. This framework allows us to quickly unpack a value proposition and core competencies and challenge our assumptions for each idea.
After completing the brainstorming, we generated a list of ideas, then selected the one we felt had the best chance for execution and success, given our known limitations.
The idea centered around helping people choose a sequence of courses based on their interests and professional goals. The recommendation system would put together groupings that met the requirements for various levels of certification, but the course makeup would be personalized to the user.
In the past, these maps have taken as little as 5 minutes, as we discovered that our “brilliant idea” was actually less brilliant than we had thought-so we ditched it and moved on to the next.
Once this idea came to light, we realized that there were several other benefits of pursuing this path:
The questionnaire would provide a constant flow of information about people’s professional goals, allowing us to see trends and changes in real-time.
Courses we had previously not marketed due to low enrollments could be suggested to specific learners, negating the need for expensive marketing campaigns and increasing the likelihood of a good learner fit.
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