What better way to understand my research process than to see a well-received proposal (sanitized version) that I submitted to the leadership of a company I worked for? While the actual project was a significantly reduced version due to resource constraints, it represents what I believed was in the project's best interest, and it leveraged a wide breadth of my skills and experience.
Introduction
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Snow Melt History
On-premise and cloud solutions for [4 different company products] were designed to address the industry's challenges [specific challenges removed]. While these four products share similar goals, they don't share the same recognizable UI patterns and don't leverage consistency that makes it easy for customers to navigate as they switch between products. The company is fully committed to aligning these products, recognizing it as a scaling pathway for consumers from entry-level to enterprise solutions. This commitment ensures that our customers will have a seamless experience across all our products.
Innovation
From Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, 3-D Printing, Mixed Reality, and other technological advances, the world is changing all around us all the time, as are buyers. Yet, one core fundamental hasn't changed: buyers spend money on solutions that satisfy their problems. These often come in little ways that are easy to adopt. Incremental innovations, when combined, can lead to significant advancements. We don't always need grand, revolutionary ideas; sometimes, small, incremental changes can make a big difference. Outdated information, changing landscapes, and marketing opportunities require the evolution of our products and processes.
This is the era of agile product development. Spending years, quarters, or months to disrupt the landscape with high-adoptability innovative solutions is too slow. Heavily prescriptive frameworks that lack speed and flexibility retards fast-scale growth. It shouldn't take an MBA to understand and execute these frameworks. The speed of innovation is crucial, and the framework/process is streamlined: Gather, Define, Ideate, Refine, Prototype, Test, then repeat - whether using a Double Diamond or Design Sprints.
Actual Challenge
The Company needs to hunt opportunities within the TAM of our vertical with adaptive innovations that solve customers’ needs at business scalability. In other words, build solutions that customers will buy because it solves their consistent pain points and frustrations.
Premise
Our current robust frameworks are designed to help OpCos identify valuable problems in strategically essential segments and create plans to solve them in meaningful, differentiated, and defensible ways. However, their density and extended program cycle can be challenging to implement and adapt at today’s speed of innovation that many other companies leverage. Distilling down to the core methods that also align with lightweight, streamlined processes like Google Venture’s Design Sprints Design Thinking or Double Diamond Model, it’s a lightweight version of our current framework. As a data-driven organization, The Company leads the market only when utilizing quantitative and qualitative research methods to understand the attitudes and behaviors of organizational teams and unique customer segments. This aids in developing best-in-class engagement strategies and solutions. The success of this proposal begins with The Company forming a Tiger team consisting of four members to move through the process efficiently. The Tiger Team (TT) has three main directives. Listen: listen and learn. Connect: connect people, processes, and products. Innovate: provide fresh, engaging perspectives on initiatives.
The Team
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