Co-designing a new EdTech platform

The documentation produced was condensed into a Product Handbook, useful for Caira Education to approach potential investors interested in becoming involved in a new financing round.

Here are the steps we took in arriving at the final definition of the product concept.

Step 1: Goal setting

Why are we doing this project?
We started the Co-design Workshop by investigating the context that led Caira Education to want to reposition itself on the market and create a new technological solution. Tano Lopez and his team wanted to expand their target audience – previously limited to the United States – internationally. They also wanted to rethink their technology platform with the aim of improving the experience of a student who wants to be directed towards the right course of study.

What are the desired deliverables?
The second step was to clarify the expectations that Caira Education had of Moze. It emerged that the priority at that time was to produce material useful for supporting fundraising activities. This helped steer the team’s efforts in the right direction.

What problems or criticalities can we anticipate?
It was then fundamentally important to define the critical success factors and other particularly delicate aspects that need to be carefully evaluated before designing a new product. These may concern product, technology, business and market issues.

Step 2: Research and positioning

Who are we targeting with this product? What problems do we want to solve?
We defined the target audience, the problems that the new solution aims to solve, and how and in what way the product should have been different from other existing solutions on the market.

What are the existing solutions?
We mapped the competing solutions on the market, evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of each of them

What are the Jobs we want to solve?
A good product can only come from a deep understanding of the problem it aims to solve. Focusing first on the needs, and then on the solution, helps to correctly direct the efforts of the work team. To focus on the needs of the typical Caira Education user, we applied the Jobs-to-be-done framework, a tool that helps you put yourself in your clients’ shoes by observing the functional, emotional and social aspects of their needs.

Step 3: Solution

What is the high-level architecture of the solution to be implemented?
Together with the Caira Education team and its technical partners we defined the components of the technological solution to be developed, listing critical dependencies and possible technical impediments.

What will the product experience be from the user’s perspective?
Through several co-design sessions, we designed wireframes describing the structure of the solution’s main screens.

What will the ‘look and feel’ of the product be?
Caira Education wanted to create a product capable of changing students’ lives for the better. It seemed to us that the user interface should play a fundamental role in the overall economy of the project: for this reason we also incorporated a first high fidelity layout hypothesis of the new solution in the Product Handbook.

What is the plan to implement the solution?
Finally, we developed a development roadmap to implement the various features listed in the product backlog.

Result

Tano and his team successfully defined the features of the new technological solution to be implemented. The Product Handbook, which crystallises the knowledge learned during the process, proved to be a fundamental tool in dialogue with mentors and potential investors of the startup.