Opening an adjacent market for an Ed-Tech start up
Driven by students, not data.
Alps Education creates analytical tools and provides educational training to help every student aspire to more.
The Challenge
Alps Education was considering moving into an adjacent market with a new suite of highly complex data analysis reports. The challenge was to demonstrate product/market fit with customer evidence to allow the CEO to decide on whether to move forward with this strategy.
The Process
- A product brief outlining the value proposition, market opportunity, route to market, risks, and a discovery roadmap.
- To rapidly gain customer insight, I built a real data prototype in Excel, allowing manual processing of report data in fraction of the time and cost to develop a solution.
- From the Department for education’s national dataset, I conducted a complex data analysis to develop a robust national benchmark.
- I collected student data from 10 schools and created high quality reports with real data, which was key in gaining high quality customer insight.
- I ran interviews and focus groups with several of the decision maker personas for each school, to understand their perspectives on the new report.
- I played back the customer insights to leadership covering the market fit, estimated price points, launch success factors and potential improvements to the report.
The Outcome
The discovery provided a clear steer that the new reports would succeed, allowing the CEO to proceed confidently to the build and launch of the new reports.
A clear indication of the likely success of the new reports in the market based on detailed customer insight.
A clear steer on the price point that would maximise uptake in the market.
The real data prototype provided a high quality guide for the development team to code against, providing designs and data to test outputs against.
Mary Ahern
CEO - Alps Education
I worked directly with Simon for several years at Alps and over recent years as a product coach.
Simon is an outstanding product leader. He is exceptionally knowledgeable on modern product, agile and experience design, he has a sharp commercial and business awareness and works hard to understand the specific context of my business to provide meaningful, actionable advice.
His insights have helped me to shape Alps into the successful business it is today.
I would highly recommend Simon as a product leader and coach.
Key takeaways
My choice to spend the time and effort creating a real data prototype paid dividends by providing high quality, contextual customer insight. This data made the choice to proceed a no brainer for the CEO. One aspect of this project I was pleased about is the company has very little exposure to discovery and customer insight. I enjoyed advocating and demonstrating the power of discovery, which has become part of the company’s day to day product practice.
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