Challenge
Beginning with healthcare, my team of three was tasked to familiarize ourselves with a vertical market and explore opportunities to better cater our products and solutions to specific verticals as well as find opportunities for new products or solutions.
Approach
This is a very research intensive project. We knew from the beginning that we would need to involve a number of subject matter experts throughout this project. While waiting to onboard a researcher, I started the project with internal stakeholder interviews. There were multiple teams involved in this initiative and I wanted to be sure that I understood their expectations. Many sales and sales engineers were also interviewed to get an overview of the types of problems we were solving in the healthcare industry.
Once the researcher was assigned, we had a good start on some initial exploration into current trends within the industry. If these came up in interviews, we would at least have an understanding of what the customer is talking about.
During the discovery research phase, I accompanied the research lead on 4 customer on-site visits. The visits included a half-day interview with IT leadership and another half-day spent shadowing end users. We collected a vast amount of information from the visits with a few phone interviews in-between each of them.
After the first round of visits we got together to create affinity diagrams to identify overarching themes. Once we decided upon the themes, we created storyboards to illustrate the challenges we saw our customers facing. We used the storyboards to run a 2 day brainstorming session with internal subject matter experts.
We left that brainstorming session with hundreds of raw ideas—some more achievable than others. We went through and combined/eliminated duplicate or similar ideas. From there we had a more manageable number of ideas. With the remaining concepts, we created concept sheets.
The concept sheets would be based on the ideas from the brainstorming session with a lot of fleshing out done by my team. We took those concept sheets and validated them with customers. We not only validated the solution, but the problem we were trying to solve as well. With this validation we would know which concepts would probably have the most value to our customers and which ideas were closest to being ready for prototyping.
When one concept would bubble up above the others while validating, we would create value propositions and do a competitive analysis of current solutions to problems similar to the one for which we were trying to solve. After the validation, we moved to more detailed wireframes for testing and to assist our prototyper in creating a functional prototype we could quickly test.
Solution
This project is on-going. Much of the details are still restricted by an NDA. In general terms, the solutions we created and validated will serve multiple purposes.
Many of the solutions we created are improvements to existing products. In those cases, my team will work with product management to get these new improvements and features onto roadmaps. Once they begin implementation my team will serve as consultants to ensure the feature or improvement solves the original need we uncovered.
In some cases, we created a concept for a brand new product. In that case the idea is put into a Lean-startup style project accelerator program whose goal is to create a minimum viable product that can be offered to our customers.
Lastly, all of our research is shared with directors and executive leadership to influence strategic decision making.