Product Strategy
Six months into being hired full time, it became apparent that, though everyone at the company was aligned around our company mission, there wasn’t shared language around the core problems we’re solving and who we’re solving them for. The lack of alignment made prioritizing product work tricky.
Aligning around a core use case
Using the Reforge framework, I ran a leadership team meeting to define a core use case for our product.
Primary Use Case: Ensure all my students have high quality postsecondary options
Persona(s): College counselors, High School administrators, District Administrators, CBO counselors
Alternatives: Spreadsheets, Tableau, Custom Dashboards, NSC, Competitors (Naviance, SchooLinks, Maia, Xello, SCOIR), Search tools (Bot, Big Future, etc.)
Motivation: Mission-aligned, care for students, financial incentive (states like Texas), charter authorization, board reports, and grant funding. More simply, I can easily access the data that is important to ensuring high quality options for my students - it is integrated into my and my students' workflow and actionable.
Differentiator: Accessible & individualized for students, flexibility to define quality, identify student needs & strategically intervene and robust reporting options
Frequency: daily/weekly for counselors, monthly for administrators
User Personas
I also worked to build personas to align around. Through intense user research defined different users of our product and their unique problems and motivations.
Product Vision
Crafted using Reforge framework and refine with team feedback.
Full narrative available on request.
Problem Statement
Constraints reduce counselors effectiveness and leave students feeling powerless through the postsecondary planning process.
Detailed Solution
Students own the process of discovering strong postsecondary options, from start to finish, with guidance from their counselors and are not limited or inhibited by their counselor's time or access. Counselors have a one stop shop solution as they work to ensure all students have high quality postsecondary options.
User Centric Resolution
Students are empowered through the postsecondary process. Counselors are more effective and energized by their work.
