Client Projects / Mach49
At Mach49, I worked in cross functional teams with teams of entrepreneurs, designers, operations leads across industries such as hospitals exploring health innovative health technologies, real Estate Companies pivoting following the Covid-19 pandemic, augmented reality for onboarding customers to a new experience, and companies learning how to promote decarbonization initiatives.
I would like to share about my contributions to two projects.
Due to NDA's, I will not be able to share any images of the original testing assets and will be focusing on process, my impact, and project outcomes
Project 1 (Duration: 3 months)
The first project I want to dive into was a related to exploring avenues into introducing cutting edge medical offerings to their patients.
On the customer side, we began by identifying the target customers and promoters. We engaged in multiple rounds of open ended interviews to understand the patients, health providers who would be offering the solutions, as well as providers who would also potentially be patients.
Since the subject matter related to mental health, I advocated to get guidance from the client on how to approach any interviewee who may be triggered by the conversation, and was able to establish guidelines for our team.
The interviews provided deeper empathy into the patient population and their journeys with addressing their mental health needs at a personal level and in the care system. We recruited those who had experiences with these new medical offerings from a variety of client types in order to get a gauge on the variety of experiences and insights into the current practices implemented with different institutions. I found that diversity of experience to be highly insightful. Additionally, speaking with medical providers brought the insight that medical providers themselves were both potential sellers of the solution as well as customers, and their particular attitudes and struggles with mental health would inform how the solution could be implemented.
In order to analyze product, market fit, we designed a series of tests and received qualitative and quantitative feedback on the level to which the participants empathized with the pains, and the degree to which the solution would be desirable to them.
From conducting approximately 100 interviews total within a couple months, our team provided a research report with in-depth testimonials and data related to pains, desirability of value propositions, and product market fit.
In this project, I ran and synthesized interviews in an empathetic and professional manner, and designed and ran interviews with various stimuli including illustrations and website and app prototypes.
Project 2 (Duration: 3 months)
The second project I want to dive into was a related to exploring avenues into providing a commercial real estate management company thinking about adapting their portfolio to a post-pandemic work environment.
I am especially proud of this project, due to learning about trusting my intuition and research through the example of our team lead, and being able to guide a team towards what the data was really stating.
Our team initially identified the types of businesses and employees we hypothesized would be target customers. My perspective was to speak with a few different groups and see what trends we were seeing, to then consider which customers to dive in deeper with. We spoke with business managers, HR personnel, and employees at medium and large businesses that were seeking to bring their employees back into the office. Through multiple rounds of interviews and conversations around what we were seeing across segments, we realized that the offerings that employers were making to entice their employees into the office were not addressing the pains they were feeling around loneliness, the need for flexibility, and their family’s needs.
We moved from open ended interviews into value proposition testing, but continued to glean deeper information around the pains the employees were feeling, and presenting a number of potential value propositions to test product market fit. Acknowledging that the research was pointing in a different direction than originally hypothesized allowed the team to advocate to the project sponsor that there was not enough pain detected to pursue the initial direction they were hypothesizing their spaces could serve.
Instead, we dove deeper into the pains the employees were feeling, and held an ideation session with the team to test a set of new value propositions that would still utilize the clients strengths and unique position.
Through crafting a new set of value propositions, we identified a solution that would be addressing the pains that employees were feeling and utilize the clients’ strengths. Within a couple weeks, we were able to recruit and conduct a 3-4 rounds of additional interviewee sets, and create and test a medium fidelity prototype of the landing page for the offering, as well as flows to explore the types of activities and benefits the employees would engage in and receive. We were able to refine our customer needs around the specific types of experiences they would be interested in participating in and the contexts of those experiences.
This allowed our team to present a solid MVP in the pitch to the sponsors, which I contributed in crafting and presenting. The project attained funding and a was handed to another team that launched a pilot thereafter.
This project was especially meaningful, as I could see how our venture ideas would truly be solving a customer pain, while utilizing the clients strengths in an innovative way. I took away learnings around how to segment customers, taking time to explore multiple value propositions, and to advocate for the signals we were receiving, as well as quick prototyping. I am proud of my team for being in unity in advocating for a pivot in solution that arose from understanding our potential customers, and understanding where current solutions were already addressing customer pains, where they were failing to, and where the opportunity lay.