Design Sprint Leadership
Let’s Identify a CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) Product Offering
Goal
Develop a viral product to help Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) buyers rapidly increase their impact
Approach
Catchafire needed a way to identify a product focus that would differentiate itself in the increasingly crowded Corporate Social Responsibility technology landscape.
I used the Design Sprint framework and led a cross-functional team that included the CEO as a team member.
We conceptualized, prototyped, and validated our solution through testing with our target buyer customers within one week.
What is a Design Sprint?
A design sprint is a time-constrained, five-phase process, developed by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky at Google Ventures, that uses design thinking to reduce the risk when bringing a new product to the market.
Map
We identified our long term goal
In two years time, Catchafire is seen as the market leader in CSR (measured by achieving $200M incremental impact and user satisfaction with an NPS score of 70 or above) with at least 30% of the Fortune 500 as clients.
Interviews inform buyer journey maps We interviewed CSR program buyers and mapped their process for discovering and adopting new tools
We combined the user journey maps and identified the two biggest areas of opportunity to focus on.
Primary opportunity: How might we provide CSR buyers with a product that is relevant to the business and equitable?
Secondary: How might we enable the collection of both quantitative and qualitative that support a business case for CSR?
Sketch & Decide
The team voted for a CSR program management tool for program admins to manage and enrich their employee engagement programs. Admins could also use the tool to gain insights into program performance.
The group sketched concepts using a rapid, iterative series of exercises (Crazy 8’s) and then voted on the strongest ideas that showed potential to achieve our goal.
Product Concept & Prototype
The strongest concept was evolved with a high-fidelity design and built into an interactive prototype.
CSR Dashboard Overview
Economy focused dashboard view
Three tier pricing structure
Events management view
Testing & Customer Validation
Three core concepts from the prototype were validated as highly desirable and valuable to the buyers: Team volunteering capabilities, Donations with company matching and the ability to measure impact through a location-based lens.
We also collected valuable insights around the buyer’s pricing expectations for a tiered pricing structure. Based on their responses we were able to adjust our pricing structure concept before going to market with it the following week.
On the fifth day of the workshop, I tested the concept prototype with five CSR buyers at Fortune 500 companies in moderated user testing sessions while the rest of the workshop team observed.
Outcomes & Next Steps
The features we tested were iterated on based on customer feedback and added to product roadmap. The stories were put into development sprints and will be released in Q3 2024.
The Design Sprint framework proved to be an effective approach for aligning the product team with the executive leadership team’s vision. We were able to rapidly move from conception to testing with real customers.
This process gave the business confidence that the new features will be effective in helping achieve our goal of expanding CSR market share and increasing revenue.