How to Overcome Business Challenges Like a Business Designer
Curious to learn actionable strategies and see business design principles applied to real business challenges? In this special episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, Becca Carroll, Executive Business Design Director at IDEO, provides advice on business challenges submitted by our listeners.
At IDEO, Becca has built collaborative research labs focused on edge technologies like blockchains, artificial intelligence and the internet of things, led futuring with leading Fortune 500 companies, and created portfolios of ventures focused on enabling systemic, human-centered change. Additionally, she advises global corporations and early stage startups on fintech trends, product market fit and go to market planning.
“Business design focuses on the viability side of the triad of desirability, feasibility and viability.”
Becca Carroll, Executive Business Design Director, IDEO
Webcast Summary
Introduction to Business Design
- Business design focuses on the viability aspect of a business, within the triad of desirability, feasibility, and viability.
- The approach integrates product management, customer empathy, and experience design to create a harmonious system for value creation and delivery.
- Becca highlights business design tools and frameworks, emphasizing prototyping, experimentation, and understanding customer needs to address business challenges.
Live Workshopping with Volunteers
Ashlon Frank's Startup Challenge: Ashlon’s startup, Shelter Share, connects elderly homeowners with young adults in need of affordable housing, exchanging services for reduced rent.
- The primary challenge is ensuring safety, trust, and effective matchmaking between homeowners and renters.
- Becca suggests using prototyping to build trust and validate assumptions, such as leveraging partnerships and creating trust signals like badges and reviews.
- The challenge is selecting the right tests and channels for market entry.
- Becca advises using experimentation to test assumptions about consumer behavior and channel effectiveness, such as setting up stands in supermarkets and comparing different distribution methods.
Ben Painter's Revenue Diversification: Ben’s organization, WholeSchool Mindfulness, aims to integrate mindfulness education in schools but is currently dependent on philanthropic funding.
- The challenge is to diversify revenue streams and expand impact.
- Becca discusses the Jobs to Be Done framework to identify core needs and suggests experimenting with new models like cohort-based training for teachers and exploring district-level partnerships.
This summary was generated with the help of AI.
In this episode with Becca, we cover:
(00:00) Introduction and Becca’s background(5:47) Building proof points for new business ideas with Ashlon
(24:13) Building confidence in a new business go-to-market strategy with Maria
(40:49) Diversifying business offers and revenue paths with Ben
(56:47) Summary of Becca’s tools and feedback on business challenges
If you want to learn more about how to address your own business challenges using IDEO business design tools and frameworks, check out our online Business Innovation Certificate.
“Business design is thinking about things like: What are we designing to help us prototype revenue, delivery, or service models? What are the core risks that this business might face and how are we mitigate them? How are we going to differentiate in the market? And creating the financial case and business model case to support investment.”
Becca Carroll, Executive Business Design Director, IDEO
About the Speaker
Becca Carroll
Executive Business Design Director, IDEO
Becca is an executive business design director at IDEO. Her career has spanned entrepreneurship in healthcare to big tech to fintech and products and services that make money work better for people. At IDEO, she has built collaborative research labs focused on edge technologies like blockchains, artificial intelligence and the internet of things, led futuring with leading Fortune 500 companies, and created portfolios of ventures focused on enabling systemic, human centered change. She co-leads Last Mile Money, an innovation collective funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where she focuses on advancing financial services to un and underbanked people worldwide. Additionally, she advises global corporations and early stage startups on fintech trends, product market fit and go to market planning.
She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA with distinction from Bates College. She spends most of her time exploring in the Bay Area with her husband and two sometimes-loud-and-always-awesome kids.
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Transcript
Coe Leta Stafford (00:00:00):
Hello and welcome everyone to the Creative Confidence Podcast, where we talk to subject matter experts about creativity, leadership, and innovation. I'm Coe Leta Stafford, Executive Design Director at IDEO U. If we have time, we will open up our chat for some questions, so feel free to drop them in. And as we're getting started, please share where you're from. I am so excited for our conversation today. We'll be speaking with IDEO's very own Becca Carroll about business design. Welcome, Becca.
Becca Carroll (00:00:30):
Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
Coe Leta Stafford (00:00:34):
Today we're going to be talking about how to use tools from a business designer's toolkit to tackle business challenges of all sorts and sizes. And to have that conversation. We're gonna be workshopping it. We're gonna be workshopping business challenges, live with three of our listeners who have volunteered to join us for the conversation. Becca, who I'll, I'll share a bit more in just a moment. We'll demonstrate live how a business designer thinks about tackling real life business challenges from bringing new markets, new products to market, to making pitches more, more investible to exploring opportunities to ensure long-term sustainability. So, Becca, you're not gonna solve every one of these challenges, but you are going to live, talk through and demonstrate how you think, and you're gonna equip us all with some tools that we can all start to use and apply in some of our own business challenges. I'm super excited. Are you ready for this, Becca?
Becca Carroll (00:01:27):
I'm as ready as I'm gonna be.
Coe Leta Stafford (00:01:29):
Okay. Before we get started, a quick introduction to IDEO U, for those of you who may be tuning in live for the first time, our Creative Confidence Podcast is from IDEO U. We are an online school and we help leaders creatively lead through any challenge. We teach you how to use design strategies, how to develop products and services that are rooted in unmet human needs. And we give you the skills to guide collaborative teams. You're gonna get a taste of that today with Becca. So I have a warm up question for everyone joining live. We have a wonderful global audience today. So I'm curious for all of you joining, what's a business challenge that you're facing right now at work, or a question you have about business design? And Becca, I'm gonna let you take a look at what people are sharing while she's doing that. Becca is an executive business design director at IDEO. She has built collaborative research labs focused on edge technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence. She leads last mile money, which is an innovation collective funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which focuses on advancing financial services to underserved and underbanked people worldwide. Additionally, and you're gonna see this all today, she has advised numerous companies from Fortune 500 corporations to early stage startups on fin FinTech trends, product market fit, and go to market planning. Becca, we're so excited for you to share your expertise with us today.
Becca Carroll (00:03:08):
I am so excited to be here. I'm excited to learn from all of you. I mean, even just reading these things that are coming through the chat, things like, okay, what are we doing to incentivize innovation? How are we getting more clients in the door? I know all of us are facing some amount of revenue contraction in some form or fashion. Things like how do we set priorities? How do we deliver more product level thinking? Ugh, I can't wait for this conversation.
Coe Leta Stafford (00:03:30):
Love it. And yep, this is clearly the right audience for it. So before we introduce our volunteers, Becca, what's one thing that you've been thinking about when it comes to business design these days? And for those who may be unfamiliar with this discipline of business design, what is it?
Becca Carroll (00:03:48):
Oh, two very good questions. Maybe I'll start with your second one first. 'cause I think that probably sets the right, um, the right context. And as much as we try to sort of brand business design, I still think we are most familiar with it in context like IDEO or the design world. But business design, it really focuses on the viability side of the sort of triad of desirability, feasibility and viability. The viability. And it's everything in between. I have a really good idea, and this thing is in market. So it blends product management, customer empathy, experience design to say, “Hey, have we created a harmonious system around the ways that we create value, deliver value, cash for value?” So you might see business designers leaning in on particular products where they're doing something like deeply understanding the core business or the competition and the competitive map that it sits within.
Becca Carroll (00:04:37):
Thinking about things like what are we designing that help us prototype things like revenue models or delivery models or service models, thinking about what are the core risks that this business might face and how are we mitigating them thinking about, okay, how are we gonna differentiate when something is in market? And maybe there are a lot of other similar things in market. And of course creating the financial case, business model case to support investment. So that's kind of like broad strokes what business design is. Um, and then a little bit about what I'm thinking about. I think business design is at such an interesting inflection point. I think for a very long time at IDEO, we've always been very prototyping forward. We've always believed that everything can be prototyped, right? It's not just the front end of a product or service, although you can prototype that it's every part of the business.
Becca Carroll (00:05:20):
But when it comes to business design, sometimes that prototyping gets a little complex to execute, right? You're thinking about, okay, I've got a couple of different revenue models I wanna try, I have a couple different service delivery models I wanna try. And sometimes it takes quite a lot of resources to stand up effective prototypes that help us get at people's behaviors. I think it's incredibly interesting to think about AI right now and how that might change our ability to prototype every element of the business, how it might change our ability to open up like myriad more ideas that are prototypical instead of having like pretty early on to zero into, okay, we gotta make some calls. We're only able to prototype three of these. Let's just go with those. So I'm super curious about that. I think we're at a really interesting moment.
Coe Leta Stafford (00:06:01):
Amazing, Becca. And like one of our listeners says too, and part of part of this, this craft is how to stay open-minded and avoid solution attachment too soon. So prototyping, okay, that was a lot, that was a lot of big ideas. Let's get really tangible, shall we?
Becca Carroll (00:06:17):
Let's do it. I'm ready.
Coe Leta Stafford (00:06:18):
Let's dig into some stories. Okay. I wanna welcome our first volunteer, Ashlon Frank. And with Ashlon, we're gonna explore the business challenge of how do you build proof points for early ideas. Welcome Ashlon.
Coe Leta Stafford (00:06:33):
Hello. So let me give, let me give context for Ashlon and his business challenge and then I'm gonna hand it over to Becca and Ashlon to talk through it. Ashlon is a product design lead at JP Morgan where he works to develop business by developing products and services that blend everything we've talked about, user-centered design and business thinking. However, we're going to go back in time a bit. While Ashlon was in university, he started incubating an idea for a really great startup, which is gonna be the focus of our talk. So we're sharing some, some info on screen, but I'm just gonna read it too. So for those of you listening, only you know where we're at. So Ashlon’s startup idea is called Shelter Share. It's a home sharing platform that connects elderly homeowners who have extra space in their homes with younger people in need of affordable housing, in exchange for the subsidized rent.
The younger housemates provide essential services such as grocery shopping, uh, dog walking, snow shoveling and tech support. This arrangement benefits the elderly homeowners by offering both income and assistance while providing the younger housemates with affordable living options. And so while Ashlon has received positive feedback, he still faces the challenges regarding Becca, what you said at the beginning, viability of the business, particularly when it comes to ensuring safety, trust, and matchmaking between the homeowner and home renter. So the question we wanna explore is how might we build proof points and validate the viability of our idea. With that, I'm gonna hand it over to Becca and Ashlon. And Becca, maybe you can, uh, dig in for a bit more context from Ashlon.
Becca Carroll (00:08:14):
Yeah, absolutely. So Ashlon, I think the first context I wanna hear is, uh, you heard Coe’s overview of your challenge and I would love to hear anything that you think that overview missed. Anything that you're like, it's really important to understand this about Shelter Share.
Ashlon (00:08:30):
Yeah, I think, uh, it's, it's also the side from the elder homeowners where it's becoming hard for them. Their house, their keeping up with their house is becoming a financial liability for them. Loneliness is something that's intangible and difficult to explain to people, but that's also a factor. And yeah, I think that that's mostly what it is, 'cause on the other side, when we speak about young adults and them having affordable housing problem, I think that's pretty clear.
Becca Carroll (00:09:03):
Got it. Yeah. So I'm hearing like you've, it's a two-sided marketplace challenge in any two-sided marketplace you're trying to dive into like, okay, which of this side, which side has the bigger problem? How do we pull them into the platform? But I'm curious a little bit more about like, you're flagging, like we have some challenges related to viability. So I'm curious a little bit about sort of the design of the business as it stands today. And then what specific challenges are you having around viability? What part of it is your hunch? Like this is not quite viable yet?
Ashlon (00:09:32):
So I see that trust, security and matchmaking is something that we think is a value proposition here, 'cause if you look at any other home sharing platforms, there are smaller things like flexible housing agreements and stuff like that that probably shelter share can offer. But when it comes to trust matchmaking and yeah, I guess safety, how do we try to make sure that that is accounted for? Our people feel safe to stay in someone else's house. We did, there was another exploration which we did was what if we, instead of having this as a business to consumer marketplace, what if we have a third person in between like organizations. Whose mission is to help the elder, the senior population. Will that kind of help break that and does that facilitate better background checks or any of that that relates to trust and safety?
Becca Carroll (00:10:33):
Got it. That makes a lot of sense. And I know you mentioned when we were chatting before that you have a couple of slides that you think articulate the Shelter Share opportunity. Do you wanna pull those up now? I think it might be useful for the audience to get a little context.
Ashlon (00:10:44):
Yeah, I could, I could do that quick. Sure. Okay. I don't see a possibility. Oh yeah, I do, I do see that. Yes. Can you all see, see my screen?
Becca Carroll (00:11:04):
We can see it.
Ashlon (00:11:06):
So, just in general, I mean, I want us to take a moment and think of our homes right now and all the countless memories attached to it. So where we live is a huge indicator of our quality of life and our identity. So it's not so surprising that more than 90% of the people about the age of 65 want to live in their homes and neighborhoods for as long as possible. But this becomes less and less achievable, like I spoke about. They need to be taken care of. Houses are becoming financial liabilities and the crisis of loneliness, uh, these are the two sides that I was talking about. On one side we have 5 million idle bedrooms in baby boomers houses, and on the other side we have 209,000 youngsters who cannot afford rents. Another interesting fact that we saw was that, I didn't mention this before, but 40% of the people said that they always wanted to rent out, but only 2% were actually doing it.
Ashlon (00:11:54):
So we thought that's what Shelter Share can fix. So to just, you know, talk about it, again, it's a home sharing platform that connects elderly homeowners who are willing to rent out a portion of their homes with young adults who are willing to offer a helping hand in their day-to-day, in return for subsidized rent. We did look at a business model because this always comes up as something very altruistic. So we were trying to tackle the viability part of it. So we saw that the total potential users are 209,000 young people who don't have rents. And if we think of it as someplace like Pittsburgh, where the average rent might be a thousand per room, and then if they, they can basically reduce their rent by 20% in exchange for just two hours of assistance. And elderly homeowners can earn up to 800 per month for previously just empty rooms in their homes, right? And if we take a transaction of 10% fee from the owner, then it's close to nine 60 per young adult per year. Now this is the total market. Of course not everybody's gonna buy it. So that's how I see that there is a potential vulnerability, but it's not pretty solid. And I, I think that safety and trust is a big concern.
Becca Carroll (00:13:14):
Got it. That makes a lot of sense. And thanks for sharing those slides. I think that's really useful context. One of the things I often think about when I hear a venture talking about we need to build out proof points is, I mean, by definition, when you're talking about a new venture, you're talking about something that is unproven, right? Yeah. You need to build out proof points for literally every element of the business. And I assume that as you were sort of developing Shelter Share, developing the opportunity, you were sort of taking it out to potential investors, partners, people who are raising like, well, this is the part that feels most unclear to me. So a tool I often use to kind of get at, okay, which of these parts do I need to prove out is something that at IDEO we call a business story. Sometimes we call it a venture story. It's kind of a mad lib type tool.
Coe Leta Stafford (00:13:58):
Sorry to interrupt, Becca, as we're gonna, we're gonna share on screen. Ashlon, do you mind stop sharing and we'll get ready to share the tool that you're about to go ahead, continue on.
Becca Carroll (00:14:09):
No worries. So for me, I think this madlib type tool is interesting in any new venture because it hits on some of the critical elements that you have to get right for your venture to be investible, right? For if you're a VC or whoever to say, “Hey, for this early stage idea, I could hit that hundred X return that I need to from a power law perspective.” And so sometimes it's useful to use a venture story like that to zero in on like, okay, where are the places that I feel really confident that I'm completely right and where are the places in this madlib that I'm like, I'm not, I'm not quite sure. I'm not quite sure people are gonna do that. I'm not quite sure the market size is that big. And so, I don't know Coe if you're able to pull it up on the screen, but I'm wondering if you kind of took this madlib approach, Ashlon and kind of walked me through like what is, what are your answers to these questions? If we could use that as a way to zero in on some of the trust and safety challenges that you're surfacing was like, are like from your perspective, the most important ones.
Coe Leta Stafford (00:15:05):
I'm just gonna read aloud for those listening. So when we say mad lib, it's a very American centric word. It's a, it's a narrative story where we're filling in the blank. So we are the business, we are going to vision for our business, the problem we're solving for whom our customers, our customers will choose our blank offer because of value proposition, we will get paid how much every how often by whom to fulfill that value proposition. Our most important costs include blank. And people can find our offer at or in here's channels during when.
Becca Carroll (00:15:46):
And actually Coe,to short circuit it, and Ashlon, if you're okay with me synthesizing a little bit from what you shared, I'm like, okay, I, I get a lot of this right? We're Shelter Share. We're going to solve the affordable high housing and loan crisis among young people and loneliness crisis among older people for college students and elderly adults in the US I presume, at least at first, we think that they're going to choose our shared housing solution because it is the safest, most trustworthy way. Like that's my hunch of why you're like, this is the part we have to get right, is we think that's gonna be the major barrier to adoption. And then you sort of talk through like, “Hey, we're gonna, we did a little bit of a bottom up market sizing. We think we're gonna get paid on commission of the people we place and they're gonna discover us.” We didn't really talk about distribution, but like maybe through colleges.
And so, all right, then it's like helpful for me. 'cause then you can zero in on like, okay, we think people are gonna choose us because we are the safest platform to do this. And so I'm curious, Ashlon, if you can unpack a little bit, what are the elements of safety that you are trying to get, right? And what are the things that you've experimented with or prototyped that help you understand like, here are ways that we can deliver that safety?
Ashlon (00:16:59):
Yeah. I don't think we actually prototyped for safety. It was, it's a bit hard to think of it or I couldn't come up with anything like prototypes. But we did speak to customers and I mean there was a lot of reading between the lines that I could see that a lot of people had done it in the past too, but they wouldn't say that they wanted to do it. I thought that it was more about compatibility for some reason. Because trust the people who I saw who had had this kind of an agreement, they came through some kind of a word of mouth. So they were okay with the trust, but compatibility wasn't a concern.
So in our prototypes that we initially had done back in school, we had thought of having a very detailed list of parameters to match. But then now we have, I don't wanna just use the word AI for this, but it is the, I think the backbone of all matchmaking services, right? Currently. So I do see that instead of just thinking of parameters, what if we just gather qualitative feedback from them or just ask them, explain what they expect and do the matchmaking based on that quality or sentiment rather than parameters that you click. And just general apps these days.
Becca Carroll (00:18:26):
That makes a lot of sense. I'm, I'm so reminded, and I'm sure you've heard this story so many times, but I'm so reminded of Airbnb's early days, right? Where at first it sounds really absurd to say, Hey, there's a stranger who's gonna show up at your house for a conference and sleep in your guest bedroom. And one of their early unlocks was looking for signals of trust that they could embed into the platform. One of which was really high quality photographs, right? Airbnb early on hired professional photographers to visit every single home and take photographs that made the home feel closer to a hotel-like experience, right? Closer to a, oh wow, this is not someone's messy unmade bed and I have to trust that when I show up. They're not gonna be scary or make me feel uncomfortable, but I'm gonna feel really comfortable. So I think there's two things I'm hearing in your thoughts around how we could prototype this.
One is we could take a prototyping approach that is we can do better matchmaking by leveraging new forms of signals from ai, from the social graph, wherever. That's great. Like you might be able to better match than any other platform. However, you still have to overcome this challenge of, the user still has to trust that you've done this. And so what are the signals that they're going to be looking to, to be able to trust that your matchmaking is actually correctly putting the right people in their homes. And so then I would think a little bit about what are the different vectors or variables you might have to play with to signal that trust? And so I'm hearing a bunch of really awesome ideas that I think are actually pretty prototypical in the comments where you might be saying things like, okay, maybe we have trusted partnerships.
Maybe our distribution strategy is anchored in universities, right? And we've got the local university kind of seal of approval. So you feel like, okay, you know, if something went really wrong, I know where this person goes to school, I know they came through this university. I feel like you could think about more sort of front end ways to develop that trust. Like thinking about things like reviews of prior tenants or reviews of, you know, like kind of the, the Airbnb host stay host guest review model. You could think about things like photographs, you could think about things like badges that people are earning when they're providing things like verification of their identity and things like that. It's a bunch of different, like things I could imagine you experimenting with. And then I think for a new venture it's like, okay, how do you pull those down into prototypical scale?
So then that would make me wonder something like, could you execute a partnership just with your university and maybe you've got four or five different indicators of trust that you want to like sort of, you, you've got strong hunches around and you wanna actually try those out with maybe four different groups of students that you're trying to place into housing. And like, I think when you're running a pilot like that, you're getting like not just what people are saying kind of data, but you're getting, oh actually, you know, we showed 40 profiles to 10 homeowners and the ones that had the shelter share badge of approval, those are the ones that got picked every single time. Okay, that's a good signal that we need to design out this badge of approval. We think that's an important trust signal to adoption.
Coe Leta Stafford (00:21:22):
Ashlon, yeah, please, we'd love to hear your reflections and then we're gonna start to wrap up. I know it's, it's far too fast, but what does it make you think?
Ashlon (00:21:31):
No, this is very interesting. 'cause I did think of them at very two different points. One is the matchmaking was more of a recent thought, uh, with AI, but I had gotten feedback about having another organization to basically wait for this. So yeah, I think I could try prototyping a way that even just in the platform, it feels a more secure that it is, that the background process is kind of seen and visible and believable, I guess.
Becca Carroll (00:22:03):
Yeah, like bringing forward some of that, even if at first you're doing that entirely manually, sometimes that ideally we call that Wizard of Oz prototyping, right? But it's like you can, you can sort of test out a version where it seems like, wow, I'm using the most sophisticated customer algorithm to do matchmaking when in prototype form, it might be your team, right? Manually doing matchmaking and something you intend to digitize in the future. But it can get you to that answer of, okay, what are the signals users are looking to, which can then get you to what I imagine the investor response is, which is we think you will have a problem with trust and adoption and that's why we're concerned that this business will not grow. And you have this like wonderful counter then to say, well, I've actually run three or four different tests of ways to signal trust. I found that X, Y, and Z work really well. So look at the ways that I'm building that into the core of the platform going forward.
Ashlon (00:22:53):
Okay. Awesome.
Coe Leta Stafford (00:22:54):
Amazing. So I know, I know we could keep talking, Ashlon, there is so much, I dunno if you've seen the chat, but there's so much support for your idea and I hope you've, you've gotten some great ideas for where you might take it next. Becca, any last things to summarize? So we, we went deep in kind of the one area, Ashlon, you mentioned trust and compatibility was the tool also could help you surface other areas where you are feeling the most kind of risk or the most unknowns.
Becca Carroll (00:23:23):
Yeah, that's what I often like to use venture stories to do. And you were, you were pretty much already there. You were like, I know this challenge, but a lot of times with new ventures, it's like, let's use that to basically, like, sometimes I'll go through and rank each part of the venture story and say, what is my level of confidence? Because so much of early stage ventures, right, is about building increased confidence. It's not about any one of those things being entirely right. It's where are you confident that you're at least going in the right direction and where are you not as confident? Because in an early stage venture, you're prioritizing, you cannot prove out every element of the business from day one. And so what are the most important assumptions you're making that have to be right to work? And then it's taking that tool and saying like, okay, now what might I prototype? What might I actually create put into market again, try to understand behavior, try to translate my insights into action. So Ashlon, this was awesome. I'm rooting for Shelter Share. I hope you, I hope you pick it back up. It sounds like a really cool opportunity.
Ashlon (00:24:17):
This is super helpful. Thank you so much, Becca.
Becca Carroll (00:24:19):
Thanks you Ashlon.
Coe Leta Stafford (00:24:21):
Thank you Ashlon. So to recap, we've been, we've been talking about the, the venture, the story tool, the business story tool and what it is, it's a, it's an essential way for landing the key pieces of what is required for a viable and valuable business. It helps you cut through the noise and summarize how you can create value and also how you can figure out where you might need to develop more prototypes in order to build that confidence.
Okay. Let's move on to our next guest. And Becca, you mentioned a lot about prototyping. I think this next guest is great. We're gonna get even more tangible about what that means to how might we prototype. So let's bring out our next volunteer, Maria Camino. And with Maria, we're gonna explore the challenge of building confidence in a go-to-market strategy. Welcome Maria.
I might give a bit of background about Maria and then I'll hand it back over. So Maria is the founder of SALSA Growth Partners, a consulting firm focused on health and wellness innovation in Latin America. She has a background in, in design and engineering from Stanford University. And over the past decade has led over 50 transformation projects across Latin America and various industries from healthcare to consumer goods, mining and finance. So Maria's specific challenge today, she comes, she's doing a project for ROE Laboratorio and Maria, I will welcome you to it even better than I will. They are a leading clinical lab in Lima, Peru and known for quality results and legendary customer service. ROE is looking to bring home testing kits to the Peruvian market, a trend that is gaining momentum currently. Home testing in Peru is limited to only a few categories, pregnancy and COVID-19 tests.
They want to expand the market by bringing tests for UTIs, drugs, pregnancy and ovulation. Amazing, amazing purpose and vision. The challenge is figuring out the next steps for market entry. They've considered various criteria for market demand, manufacturing constraints, desirability. They have a lot of information that points to which tests they should bring to market, but not entirely confident about the choice or the sequence. They're also looking at ways, they have to make choices around channel and brand. So the question that Becca and Maria are gonna explore are how might we build confidence in our go-to-market strategy and prioritize those next steps, juicy space. Becca, I'm gonna head over to you and Maria.
Becca Carroll (00:26:56):
Amazing. Maria, this is so cool. What an interesting market making opportunity. I'm curious a little bit, you sort talked about, hey, you guys have considered what are the right tests to run, what are the right channels? Tell me a little bit more about this challenge or this opportunity and then what criteria you've been using to narrow in on here's what our first product should look like.
Maria (00:27:21):
Sure. Can I share a couple slides?
Becca Carroll (00:27:23):
Yeah, that would be great.
Maria (00:27:25):
Okay, perfect. Alright. So two key facts to talk about before going into that are first that most people in Peru who get sick don't get to go to the doctor. And the second one is that pharmacies don't have aisles where people can walk around like in the States. So having that in mind for the challenge, we want to capture this unserved market and get to especially rural areas by creating this at home rapid test business unit.
So to answer your question that what we've looked at so far to narrow down our test short list is our first sales records of similar businesses in the land market region. We've done some user research interviews, we've benchmarked in Europe in the states looking at Walgreens aisles, CVS aisles. We have our own testing, patient testing data, but we really didn't feel like we had the right approach. So right now our best shot has been looking at feasibility. So tests that are FDA approved and we're matching that with asking ourselves and based on the user research that we've done, what problem are we solving for our user? And that's how we've narrowed it down to four main testing options, which would be for UTIs, multi-drug, multi-drug tests, pregnancy and ovulation. And HIV obviously all for different kinds of users. But that's what we got, we've got so far.
Becca Carroll (00:29:22):
That's awesome. So I'm, I'm seeing in this you're certainly using some amount of competitive mapping, right? Okay. We've got similar businesses or we can, you know, go to CVS and states and say, hey, hey, here are the tests that are available. We're using some qualitative research insights to understand which of these tests are gonna be important. And then we're using some amount of like, yes, feasibility compliance. Like you can't offer something that might take, you know, a billion dollars to develop and it's not approved anywhere. And like, sure, it'd be great to have a money tree in my backyard that grows money, but like, it's not feasible to create. So I wanna actually dig in a little bit to your point of, so we did that, but then we weren't really confident in what the answer was. So tell me a little bit about why you weren't confident or what kinds of thresholds you were looking to or you have a hunch would create confidence for you.
Maria (00:30:10):
That's a great question. It's just there's so many options, about going at this problem that really that that, that's a really good question that I hadn't thought the answer to before. But yeah, I just feel like there's so many options that we, so many combinations of pieces of information that we could take that this is what's making sense to us right now, but there's, there's not a method that says, okay, this is the right one, this is the wrong one, and we're working on the, we're on the right track.
Becca Carroll (00:30:50):
Oh my gosh, I feel it. I think it actually relates to Ashlon’s venture story thing too. It's like, okay, when you're creating something new, in your case Maria like creating a new market, right? Like it's, it's not like you're saying, “Hey, we're gonna launch another COVID test, there's 50 covid tests and we need packaging designed to stand out.” It's like nobody's doing these tests right now, so when we make this large investment roll out the new product, it has to be because we believe that we're gonna be able to make sales, we're actually going to be able to make that market. And so I find a lot of times then because you're sort of talking about the permutations and combinations, it can be really useful to think about, well what are the actual experiments that we might run that might actually get us to early and then even later signals of actual behavior, actual buying behavior, actual usage behavior, actual sending behavior, sending in behavior cost, all of that.
And so like one of the things I'm thinking about or I'm hearing is you're saying it's like, okay, there's a bunch of different variables you're looking at. It's what tests do we offer? It's probably like where do we offer them, right? Like do we have a kiosk? Do we set up our own storefronts? Is it all online and people have to discover it that way. It's presumably some constraints around like within those tests, how do we actually give them to the customers and get them back? Because if I'm understanding right, some of them you're, you're sending back, it's not just all in one or are they all like kind of all in one. You take the test and you can do it all yourself.
Maria (00:32:13):
For now it's self sampling and self. Okay. So we're starting with that because it would add more complexity.
Becca Carroll (00:32:22):
Great. I'm glad I just removed a variable. So like, I think as you're thinking about those permutations and combinations, one of the things I would do is like literally like, and you probably have this laid out in a graph somewhere, but look at your four or five different prioritized tests and the three to four different channels that you might go after and pull out what are some of the specific hunches you have that these, these ones are gonna be the lowest lift to stand up and the highest likelihood of adoption. That part is going to be an assumption, right? So that's what I would sort of start with is pull that out and start to articulate. Like I have this assumption that if we could offer, you know, home UTI tests and if those were in kiosks at the supermarket, we would achieve X, Y, Z penetration.
But the next thing I would do is actually say like, okay, cool, that's an assumption. Let's actually turn that assumption into a prototype. So, Coe I think you're gonna pull this up. Sometimes we use a worksheet to do this. It's not rocket science, but it can be helpful to sort of clarify thinking. So effectively it's an experiment design worksheet. So it says, you're gonna surface an assumption that's critical if this thing is gonna work. So in this case it might be, oh, I'm willing to buy a home UTI test at the grocery store, right? That we say that, I don't know what the percentage is and what the right benchmarks are for your specific context, but we say that like, you know, 3% of people visiting the grocery store in a given week are gonna be candidates for a home UTI test and they're actually gonna pick it up and buy it.
You then turn that assumption into a question that you might be able to prototype against, right? Which is like, well, okay, what would need to exist for people to pick up home UTI tests at the supermarket? And then you might say like, okay, great, what I might do is actually build out a minimum viable prototype to answer that question. So in your case, it might be, I'm gonna set up, I'm not gonna build the vending machine that's not minimum viable, but I might set up, you know, I might negotiate with the local supermarket, set up a stand and actually set some benchmarks for I wanna see this level of throughput. That's what my, you know, business model suggests should be viable. Let's put that stand in a local supermarket and see if we're seeing that throughput. And you can obviously scale this up and up and up, but as you were talking Maria, I was reminded so much of PillPack, um, if anyone's not familiar with PillPack is a mail order pharmacy.
They were bought by Amazon a few years back, when they started, they're actually, we were, we got to work really closely with them and they had lots of really analogous questions even down to things like, well, what should the pricing be? Should it be $19 a month, $29 a month, $39 a month? And literally the way they prototyped it was they went to a local mall, set up a kiosk and had a brochure with $19 that they offered on Friday, a brochure with $29 they offered on Saturday, a brochure with $39 that they offered on Sunday. And this gave them, again, more directional confidence that the answer was right. So I'm curious, hearing all that, like if you were to sort of take that and come back into, okay, now we've got these different permutations, what are some of the experiments that are coming to mind for you? What are the things that you might run?
Maria (00:35:33):
Oh, definitely something along the lines of what you're suggesting, um, supermarket in terms of channels, supermarket, train stations, like thinking about since the main attributes are privacy and access, not thinking about the traditional places where you would buy, where you would, where you would buy a test, but thinking more of, okay, where, where would be a very private place where someone could buy an HIV test without feeling anything. So in terms of channels, yeah, I would try to think as wide as possible and, I still feel like I need a box to prototype that actual buying of the test. Yeah, this is that kind of thing where you can't really prototype an idea. Like imagine this, it's just like, are you picking up the box or are you not?
Becca Carroll (00:36:36):
No, I I actually think that's literally like in some ways what I would do, even if like, and this is like a little bit tricky, of course you have like compliance constraints you have to run through, of course you have to get supermarkets or whoever to agree to let you run the small scale prototype. But depending how small scale it is, that may be easy or hard. And you could think about creating comparison points, right? Where in some places you might have a box and the test, which I'm assuming is mostly already developed or close to developed enough that someone might get, or you might even just be assessing demand, right? Where then you just have maybe a box, but maybe the box contains a coupon to go to your local lab because we haven't actually developed the end-to-end test kit.
You could even compare those channels with one another if you wanted to run multiple simultaneous experiments, right? You could say, okay, we're gonna do one of these in a supermarket. We're gonna do one of these at a local kiosk that's branded health tests. We're gonna do one of these purely online and we're gonna do one of these through a partner. And we actually think like comparing all of those in real time is gonna give us confidence on like, what is the right channel? And I would think about like, again, going back to that grid of the different permutations and combinations, which ones do feel most strongly about is like, you're probably gonna have to make some choices about which ones you test, right? You probably cannot run a test for every permutation and combination out there. So I think that's where that prioritization matrix comes in of okay, within that, like, do we think that that's actually feasible? Even if it tests the best, do we think it's feasible to go deliver it? And do we think that it could drive the revenue we wanna see out of this product?
Maria (00:38:07):
And do you think we should keep our original established traditional brand?
Becca Carroll (00:38:17):
This is such a good question, because I have seen, I frankly, I've seen organizations do it both ways and there's a whole bunch of different reasons that you might do it. So to your point, like ROE Laboratorio has this established plan that's the asset, right? Like that's something that like not everybody has that's meaningful, but it may or may not serve to bolster the product depending on what the product is. So I've seen organizations where they're like, we have this established brand, we're a bank, but people kind of associate us with like, not necessarily great things. Like our brand equity is not that great. And so actually if we wanna roll out this product, we might wanna do it under a sub-brand that doesn't carry the baggage of the existing brand.
In your case, I'm seeing like, okay, there are specific things that you would want people to associate with the product, that it's private, that it's instant successful. Some of the things that you're seeing over there, to your point on, on ROE Laboratorio, those aren't part of what you are sort of imagining the customer promise of these tests to be. So again, this is something else that I would test is, I would actually have a couple of different boxes. One with new brand, and obviously you design out the brand to hopefully convey all these wonderful adjectives on the screen.
But I might literally have a test that you run where you're like, all right, we've got some boxes that have our core brand and some boxes that have a new brand. Are we seeing a difference in uptake? And you may find like, no brand awareness just isn't high enough. So it's not really making a difference. So we should just go with the one that is logistically most feasible to deliver. Or you may find like, wow, actually everybody's going to the trusted brand because even though we've designed this brand to confer trust, it still feels like a startup. It still feels unknown, or you may find like, uh, actually everyone's going to our new brand. So again, it's something that I would actually explicitly test as part of your live prototypes.
Maria (00:40:08):
Great. Thank you so much.
Becca Carroll (00:40:10):
Thank you so much, Maria. This is such an interesting challenge.
Coe Leta Stafford (00:40:13):
Maria, thank you for coming on. This has been amazing. So to summarize, and just to put a point at it too, what we've been talking about is that it was a prototype and it starts with surfacing assumptions. And that what we really focus on is actual behaviors. So I think at this stage in a, in a, in a business, people often think of very elaborate validation type tests. And Becca, what you're guiding us to think about is, how to design that minimum viable test or experiment that gets to actual behaviors.
Becca Carroll (00:40:41):
I would get it at like design the minimum viable test because for a new venture you're getting a minimum viable confidence. Like Maria, you're signaling like you're not quite there, but that's what you want, right? You want enough confidence to say, I'm gonna run down the runway for the next step, whatever the next step in this new product is, because you're never going to have a guaranteed, I have solved every element and I know for sure it's gonna work. It's always gonna be a risk. So it's about figuring out what is the minimum level of confidence I need to actually go out and take this risk.
Coe Leta Stafford (00:41:10):
Thank you. All right. Thank you so much. Thanks Maria. Maria, thank you. And so this has been wonderful, Becca. We have one more and um, and I wanna dig into it 'cause again, and now we're gonna go into a little bit of a different path of just thinking about additional ways to expand an offer. So let's bring our next volunteer and he's already here. Hi Ben. Welcome Ben. So we're gonna explore with Ben the challenge of demystifying offers and revenue paths. Um, I'm gonna do the same intro. Ben is a partner and co-founder at WholeSchool Mindfulness, which is a US-based nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing a more mindful building, a more mindful education system. So let me tell you a little bit more.
WholeSchool Mindfulness, for the past five years they've supported schools in launching and supporting mindfulness director positions across the country. And you've been providing seed funding to the schools and professional development to support that role of these mindfulness directors. So the challenge with this is, so while the model has been successful, it's showing impactful progress and its programming. The cost of launching new directors is high. And right now we are, they're 100% dependent on philanthropy for growth. So Ben and his team are interested in exploring opportunities to diversify revenue streams in order to increase the ability to make impact and build a more sustainable organization. So the core challenge we're we wanna talk about is how might we think about crafting new offers and diversifying our revenue?
Becca Carroll (00:42:59):
Very cool. Oh my gosh, this Ben, this is such a cool initiative. Um, wait, okay, so tell me more. So the, the structure is that you place a mindfulness director in the school. Right now you fund a hundred percent of that director, is that right?
Ben (00:43:18):
So it's a, it's a little bit different than what you're describing. Okay. Actually, typically it's somebody who's already employed and working at a school here. So let's say it's an English teacher who loves mindfulness, has a practice, has already potentially identified that mindfulness would be helpful for their students and has been integrating it in some way kind of on the side. They hear about us and say, oh my gosh, this is the dream role I never knew could exist. And then they would apply to us with their, with their school administration support. And if selected as a mindfulness director, we would provide some seed funding to the school to help kind of grease the wheels of bureaucracy and get a position carved out either part or full time. And with the mindfulness directors, we support them with professional development and community throughout the year.
Becca Carroll (00:44:09):
Got it. And so in that, in that context of it's someone at the school, it's kind of an organic demand, at least from the, the usage side of, I wanna do this at my school and I kind of make the case. When you're saying we sort of grease the wheels from bureaucracy, is that because the person actually needs to change their role pretty tremendously? Like they were an English teacher and now they have a new job, which is mindfulness director. Is that right?
Ben (00:44:30):
We, we, we see a few different, a few different things. Some schools are ready for whatever, lots of different kind of causes and conditions are ready to transition. Somebody's full-time role over to teaching mindfulness, we do see that. However, the majority of the time it's not that clean cut. Perhaps they, in addition to their full-time role, they have a paid after school role where they're doing mindfulness or you know, somebody takes over one of their classes and they're doing mindfulness during that block. That kind. Got it. But it's a little bit, we meet schools where they're at.
Becca Carroll (00:45:05):
So it's not a plug and play product, it's a, hey, we, we meet you kind of design something custom for the situation you find yourself in. And then, okay, tell me more about this challenge. So is this a conversion challenge that you fund them with philanthropic dollars and then there's some point at which the dollars run out? And then there's just this question mark about like what now.
Ben (00:45:25):
We've tried a couple models there. Originally we did a percentage based model where Year 1 we would pay 100% of their salary. Year 2 we pay 75%, Year 3 50%, Year 4 25%. And the idea is that the school, as they got to see the impact of the mindfulness programming, would take on more of the cost and that was extremely expensive, 'cause you know, somebody who's in a school district who's been there working for a while might be making a hundred thousand dollars. So it could really, you know, rack up our cost per school cost. So now we've pivoted to a model where it's a two year based funding model with a cap of $50,000 total. So 25K a year for, for two years.
But what we're interested in exploring now is not every school is ready for that type of arrangement, even with the catalytic funding. And is there an opportunity for us to offer a different type of programming that we might even be able to earn some revenue off of that might, you know, establish our name in the space, get more mindfulness to the schools in a different way, and potentially build relationships that one day might lead to a mindfulness director model.
Becca Carroll (00:46:37):
That makes a lot of sense. It's kind of making me think of, and I know Coe you have this tool at the ready, but it's kinda making me think of the jobs to be done framework, if you're familiar with that.
It's a really useful framework that came from Clay Christensen several years back. Effectively, it's that we design product services systems and we think like that's the whole of what the product or service does, but actually like what the product or service does for the user is solve some kind of problem, do a particular job for them, right? And so I think it can sometimes be helpful. And in this context, I think it's useful to think about it this way is to, like, Ben, I'm curious to hear from you like, what is the core job to be done or the job that you hope that any product that WholeSchool Mindfulness ever offers is going to do? And then you can start to think about it, this framework is kinda useful 'cause it says like, okay, well what are the different ways you've manifested that?
Like currently you have this way, right? It's a 50% funded model for two years. But then I think the third thing that's really interesting about that kind of outer ring is what are the jobs that stakeholders are doing in order to adopt your job? So in your case, I might imagine like we've got a job to be done. It's about expanding the capability of schools to support mindfulness education. The structure we have right now is we fund teachers for two years to develop programming, create content, whatever. But the jobs that the school districts need to do are pretty myriad to adopt us, right? They have to, the teacher has to find, someone has to find us, they have to write the proposal, they get funded for two years, but then they have to find funding somewhere. They've presumably got some sort of board approvals that they have to go to.
And so I think this kind of framework can be useful as you're thinking about like, well, what are the other things we might experiment with to basically start to map out, okay, we've got this hunch. Maybe you have a hunch, I'm sure you have many, right? About like maybe we could offer some sort of online courseware where people are, you know, where any teacher could easily sign up for mindfulness training. Let's think about then like what are the different jobs to be done that they would need to go through to actually adopt that? And you could start to then start to map out like, well, what would be really complex to get adopted? What would be really simple to get adopted? And then the second set of mapping you could do is like, well, what's feasible for us to actually deliver? So curious how that's landing with you. And also, did I get your job to be done, the core job to be done of WholeSchool Mindfulness?
Ben (00:48:54):
Yeah. I think, I think you did. You know, there are a lot of ways to get mindfulness into schools. They're the, they're the curricula, they're the train the trainer models, they're the apps, they're the outside service provider coming in, doing some mindfulness and then leaving. And what we're, you know, our perspective is that mindfulness done best in a school is really rooted in community. So it's somebody who's a, a trusted member of the community and they're into it and they have a dedicated role or some time to do it.
And one thing that has come to mind that'd be interested to see how it fits into this framework is I think one of the biggest value adds is the learning community of mindfulness directors that we have going. And really just the mental model shift that can occur in those cohorts when people are in community supporting each other and have dedicated time to really think strategically, how can I integrate mindfulness into my school? Something happens that's separate from the money, it's really just like a mental model shift of the individuals. So I am curious about if we could do some kind of cohort based model for people that aren't necessarily dedicated mindfulness directors. Have an interest in infusing mindfulness into their culture.
Becca Carroll (00:50:03):
Oh, that's really interesting. And I see the note in the chat. I will check myself. I misstated, um, jobs to be done was popularized by Clay Christensen, but actually as a long history before Clay Christensen with a number of thinkers coining it. But okay, so I'm hearing like a specific structure there, Ben, which is, all right, we have one structure that is the current funded model. We have another structure of how we could do that job, right, of equipping schools and teachers to expand mindfulness education, which is creating these cohort type models. And then I could think of like, okay, in order to adopt then a bunch of other things need to be true, right? Then we need to say, okay, our existing, you know, teachers might be willing to share best practices and what they've learned.
New teachers might have, you know, an extra 30 minutes in their week to absorb this content. Presumably there's some like cost associated with it potentially. So like could we, is that something that is within a teacher or a principal's discretionary budget or is that something that they need to go find funding for? I kind of wonder if you were to sort of populate like what are all the different structures we have hunches around and almost plot them on a two by two and start to think about like, well for WholeSchool, what is the revenue impact, right, that we might see? Because you could develop something amazing that you gave away for free and it doesn't really solve your core challenge of like, but then, but how does that make us sustainable as an organization? But so what is the impact? If this works, if we did it right, what would the impact be?
And then also how feasible is it for WholeSchool to deliver it? Because you might, there might be really interesting and exciting opportunities to go after that are so far from the current structures you've put in place. That'll be really expensive to stand it up, even if it is a very big economic opportunity. And that might help to sort of prioritize a little bit into like, what are the different streams of revenue we might wanna go after? Where I could imagine like, there's a totally different approach, right? Which is, okay, we actually think the current way is right, but we need to massively expand the amount of funders that come in because we know it's not gonna be school district. So then it might be things like thinking about philanthropy, parent funding, like lots of different avenues that you might think about. But I might think a little bit in that kind of realm. And I'm curious, like you're, you're raising cohort models as one alternative option, but I imagine there are a bunch of others that you're thinking about that could be new revenue streams for you.
Ben (00:52:22):
Yeah. Well, uh, one, one way we've thought about it is really changing our point of entry. Right now, our typical entry is, you know, a mindfulness director candidate. So an English teacher, a math teacher hears about us and they apply and they're lobbying, they're typically their principal or assistant principal to, to work with them on the application. So it's a very much a bottom up approach. And what we've found is that, uh, that has its advantages for sure, but sometimes those people don't have really levers of power when it comes to budgetary decision making. So we've thought about changing our point of entry to district leadership, and there's also ways in which, so districts have access to more money. It's a lot more competitive as a space because a lot of folks are going after district funding. So you have to be a little bit more sophisticated. You have to be data backed, evidence-based things that are, are relatively high bars to reach, but there's more money potential there. If we could really find a way to meet district leadership needs,
Becca Carroll (00:53:28):
What would have to change about the core product? Or do you have hunches about what would have to change about the core product to meet district needs? I'm hearing like we would need to gather more data, but do you think the way the product is delivered would need to change? Or do you think like, actually it could work exactly the same way just from a different pot of money?
Ben (00:53:43):
I think it, what would need to change partially is the kind of buy-in around mindfulness in the United States, or to really scale again, that's partially what we're going, yeah. Creating proof points. But aside from that, I think it wouldn't be that big of a pivot, but right now it's kind of one mindfulness director per school. And it could be one mindfulness director per district working across 8 to 10 schools, and that might make it more feasible.
Becca Carroll (00:54:12):
Interesting. So you could think about it. Yeah, if you, if you went at the district level, you could think about it as like, okay, cool, this could be a shared service and it could be tapped by a school whenever they need it. I think there's also that comment you're sort of saying like, oh, well the overall environment, the, that's also something we think about a lot in business design, right? Is like, what are the macro trends that enable or get in the way of scaling, right? And how do we align the way that we're delivering our product to those macro trends, right? Where I might say like, yeah, okay, we are seeing mindfulness, kind of like having a moment, but not necessarily at the school district level, but probably more likely among like parents, right? Thinking about like, okay, now like my office offers the comm app as an employee benefit.
So I, but like that makes me think about like, okay, if the macro trend is being expressed in that way, how do you leverage that to actually increase support for WholeSchool? Which doesn't mean getting out of schools, but might like change. Like, okay, maybe our delivery model is actually about building persistent parent demand for mindfulness education in school. And so what, what, what might we create that has parents, you know, showing up at their local school district saying like, why aren't you teaching my kids this? I want them to see this. Yeah. So like, I think there's like a bunch of different avenues you could think about to sort of generate that demand. But I think including the sector level trends is actually a really useful forcing function to be like, okay then what could we realistically go after? What could we realistically win?
Ben (00:55:35):
Thank you.
Coe Leta Stafford (00:55:37):
Thank you. I'm gonna start to wrap us up, Ben. Thank you. Thank you. Becca, could we, you covered a lot of territory with Ben. Can we, can you just help summarize for Ben and I at least?
Becca Carroll (00:55:48):
For sure.
Coe Leta Stafford (00:55:49):
And the big idea, like, so why, why talk about jobs to be done as one of the, we often talk about using tools to build, to think it helps expand the ways in which we see problems.
Becca Carroll (00:56:01):
So about it is like if you can get clear about your job to be done, you can kind of release yourself from the constraint of like, oh, this is the way, this is how the product works. Okay. And a lot of times when you find that there's an existing product, like in WholeSchool that's in the market doing well, you can be pretty constrained of just like, well that's how it works. So it has to work that way in the future. But if you can go zero in on what is the job to be done, then you can kind of expand your aperture to say, well what are the different structures by which I might deliver this job? And then I do think it's a good forcing function to then say like, well everyone around me who might use me to do this job has a bat, has an alternative to using me.
They have another way of getting this job done. And so thinking about, well, what are the other ancillary jobs, ancillary activities they're gonna have to do in order to adopt me? That can be a good forcing function to be like, okay, here's how we can prioritize. Because while it's not a math equation, it is a little bit of an equation, right? The work they have to do to adopt me has to be less than the benefit that they're getting by adopting me. And so it can be a good sort of forcing country to say like, well, which of these might we prioritize that we think are gonna be viable in the market? Because that equation is making sense. It's evening out.
Coe Leta Stafford (00:57:09):
Amazing. Thank you Ben, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing and best of luck.
Becca Carroll (00:57:16):
Yeah, I appreciate you both. Thanks Ben.
Coe Leta Stafford (00:57:19):
So Becca, we are gonna start to wrap it up. I think we all agree you would, who doesn't want your own podcast? Like, like business design challenges with Becca. Like, you are amazing.
Becca Carroll (00:57:30):
This is fun. Oh my goodness. I'm like, not, not with me necessarily, but I would listen to this weird college show of like, here's my business problem.
Coe Leta Stafford (00:57:38):
You're amazing and I wanna thank all of our volunteers, Ashlon, Maria, and Ben, thank you for sharing your challenges and being open to workshopping live with us and I hope that all of you join me today, get a sense of, so here's how we approach business design. So there's tools and mindsets that can both widen the aperture of how you think about your problem, help you identify some things you might not be thinking about. And then there's also tools that help you hone in, like prototyping, like surfacing assumptions to really gain traction and confidence and proof points to get to the next step. It's not about solving everything, but it's about keeping that momentum to the next, next question, next step in your business design. With that, I'm gonna wrap us up. Becca, I have one last question for you and, I always love to end with what advice would you give to yourself earlier in your career while you think on that, I'll just wrap us up.
So again, thank you everyone for joining us. We've been speaking with Becca Carroll, who's an executive business design director at IDEO. If you like this style of episode and want to get feedback on other projects, we would love to hear more. We'll be, uh, sharing a post-webinar survey, which will be prompted and you can take it right after you sign off from the call. If you want to dive deeper into some of the tools and mindsets that you saw today, I invite you to check out our Business Innovation Certificate. The tools that you saw, some of them, are glimpses into what is taught in our certificate program. And I highly recommend if you're looking to gain insight in how to use more tools to solve business challenges like the ones you heard today, please check it out at ideou.com/bizcert. And with that, Becca, final advice for your younger Becca self?
Becca Carroll (00:59:20):
Tough question. Okay. This is what the advice I would give myself and maybe it's useful to everyone in the room who's presumably a business thinker, a business person. A lot of times in business you're sort of taught to think very linearly to think about your career very linearly, to think about what are the things that I can do to reduce risk? What is the safest choice I could possibly make? And I actually think my advice to my younger self self is like, don't think linearly. Don't try to think entirely logically about your career as being a specific ladder. You have to climb. Think about it like it's a marathon through the fog, right? And so if you are curious and open to where the path is leading you and you're putting your feet in front of you, that's it. You're doing it. You're on the right track. Like trust the race course, it's gonna get you where you wanna go.
Coe Leta Stafford (01:00:04):
Magnificent. Thank you, Becca. Thank you everyone for joining.
Becca Carroll (01:00:08):
Thanks everyone. Bye bye.
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