Final product designs used for production
Building digital tools to improve the quality of life for youth in foster care nationwide.
Together
We Rise
Together We Rise is a national non-profit organization working to transform and improve the way youth experience foster care in America.
Role
Product Manager
Product Designer
Deliverables
Product Market Research
Customer Research
Prioritized Backlog
Product Designs
Summary
Together We Rise is a national non-profit organization that aims to transform and improve the way youth experience foster care in America. They recognized the need to create a digital platform that could improve the services currently being done with analog tools. However, with no prior experience building a digital product, the organization faced various challenges in launching the platform. They needed someone to help align the team and the organization, create a development strategy and lead a remote agile team to ship incremental value in order to get the product launched.
Initial workshop to help the team align on high priority opportunities
The Challenge
Together We Rise wanted to create a digital platform to help social workers and foster care agencies improve the way they work to better support youth in foster care nationwide. The organization recognized a gap where a digital platform could improve services currently being done with analog and/or disconnected digital tools. With no prior experience building a digital product, the organization struggled to get the platform up and running. They needed someone to help align the team and organization on its goals, create a development strategy and lead a remote agile team to ship incremental value and get the product launched.
Our Approach
We started with a series of Design Thinking-Based workshops to better understand where there was misalignment and what was holding the team back from moving forward with the product. We came away aligned on specific next steps for the team, a prioritization of development needs and goals.
Internal usability testing to help team members understand user pains
Customer research with social workers and agencies to prioritize development
Our first main goal was to get the product to a state where we could put it in front of potential customers to gain insight into the complexities of the challenges faced by agencies and social workers and what the solutions should entail. We also brought on a subject matter expert to help the rest of the team better understand the problem space and make better decisions.
Throughout the project, I continued to run intermittent Design Thinking-based workshops to identify what assumptions we were making that should be researched and tested to inform product decisions, to help ensure the team was aligned on what and how solutions would be built, and to help us fill and prioritize the product backlog.
Using Agile management, allowed our team to deliver incremental value to customers every two weeks, include stakeholders and customers in the development process, and ensure we were consistently aligned and moving forward as a team.
"Our team was struggling to get our product off the ground and Maicol got everyone on the same page and aligned us on a clear direction. The way Maicol uses Design Thinking, Agile methodologies, and his product design background, helped ensure a successful launch of our initial product offering."
Kevin Jung
CTO, Together We Rise
Alignment on where to shift development priorities due the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic