The Assignment:

We designed a learning workflow for a textbook publisher’s internal innovation team to support their prototyping and product development.

What we did:

We worked with a major textbook publisher to augment their existing experiment model to foster iterative learning across the team, and across initiatives.

Then we worked with the team to train them on best practices for early stage customer development research, where concepts and prototypes serve as the stimulus for discussion.

We engaged in an ongoing “office hours” model to serve as a sounding board for the team as they carried on with their experiments and research.

What they got:

We revamped their experiment canvas to help them synthesize their learnings from prototype tests, creating a more iterative workflow that would enable them to learn what to make.

We also helped them develop a workflow model for testing, learning and tracking their experiments.

And we helped them create templates for discussion guides, notes and analysis that could be shared across the team.

The results:

The team continues to use this experiment model to develop early stage concepts that influence product development and acquisitions.