Business Case Studies & Business Publications

The Win You Design

Cowan, Alex

Case

The Win You Design

Cowan, Alex

OM-1707 | | 10 pages Case

Collection: Darden School of Business

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Product Details

This case is designed to introduce general management students to the process of early-stage customer discovery for a new venture, be it entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial. Andrew, an HR manager, had just experienced a big success in creating a skills-assessment and professional-development plan for his company's IT and product-development department. The project had been labor intensive, and once Andrew got to thinking about software that could do the heavy lifting, he decided to venture out and start his own company that could deliver an enterprise application to help managers assess skills and plan learning journeys at scale. Having designed a business model, he set out to gauge interest in his product through a survey for other HR managers followed by in-person interviews. He was encouraged by the feedback he received from these explorations, but upon launch, he got very little actual business. Had he done something wrong? What could he do differently?

- Identify the right and the wrong tools for the critical job of early customer/user discovery - Use these tools to make the hard decisions about what to focus on and what to defer