Scaling Impact

Lindajoy Jackson is the Director of Business at Hopeworks and has a demonstrated history of working in the government administration industry.

LindaJoy is skilled in Coaching, Management, Leadership, Risk Management, Strategic Planning, and Business Development. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Scaling Impact:

• What an antipoverty organization does.
• The opportunities having tech knowledge gives you.
• How to measurably drive the impact an organization is having.
• What it means to scale impact.
• The implications of scaling impact.
• How to leverage technology and software to reach a wider audience.
• What being trauma-informed means and why it’s important.

Resources:

• Hopeworks
• NxtStep
• Podcast Chef

Connect with Lindajoy Jackson:

• LinkedIn
• Email

Connecting with the host:

• Sean Boyce on LinkedIn
• Sean Boyce by Email

Quotables

• 2:36 - “If you’re between the ages of 17 and 26 those are our only parameters for joining the program 99 percent are unemployed and making 400 dollars or less a year the goal is to get them into a stable living wage or above job so for us on average people are making 43 thousand dollars a year when they come out.”
• 4:39 - “You don’t necessarily need a postsecondary degree or anything like that to get into the field so that’s a great place that entry-level tech space we know that people can make a good salary and then with some soft skills as well as actual some actual tech skills that can really open up a door for them where not only can they get in at a really great place there’s also a tremendous amount of growth that they can have in their careers as well.”
• 12:02 - “For impact I think a huge piece is being able to serve more people when we talk about scaling so that means our physical facilities have to be different we have to have more space.”
• 23:42 - “It’s so easy to keep moving a million miles an hour sometimes we can forget how important it is to just take a step back and take a breath and hear somebody out in terms of how’s everything going, everybody's so focused on pushing and moving forward but if you don't take that time and take those necessary precautions then that can set up some form of failure or setback at a later date which you could have prevented.”
• 24:42 - If you had had a brief conversation and someone just said I need two days off to deal with this you could have avoided turnover or whatever that might be and what we have found is that it has made us more successful not less successful, our numbers are getting better and better as we turn into a trauma-informed organization impact, success, KPIs went up.”

If you'd like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by more than double in less than half the time, I'd encourage you to sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact/.

What I talk about in this episode:

• Why overhead is vilified
• Why it really shouldn’t be
• Why a higher overhead is a sign of progress
• Where the focus really should be
• How to position your performance to avoid this trap

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is why overhead is consistently vilified, or why it shouldn't be because it matters when it comes to scaling impact. 

Now, overhead is everyone's favorite line item on the balance sheet to pick on, especially when it comes to nonprofits. The public and other people seem to have this impression that if you're doing what you're supposed to be doing or you're making the most of the dollars that are contributed towards you, and your overhead should be extremely low or near zero. For a whole multitude of reasons. This is just wildly impractical, and in my opinion, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what overhead represents. 

Now, while we might not all love the fact that we have to have and manage overhead, it doesn't mean it isn't important. Your overhead is a key element of making sure that you have a strong team. If your overhead is being kept ridiculously low deliberately so then that is going to impact the strength of your team and what your team is capable of. I love the saying that goes if you want to go fast go alone and if you want to go far go together. The reason why I like that is because it really highlights the fact that you can't do this alone, and you can't remain ridiculously lean to the extent where it affects your performance. You need a strong team if you're going to have a strong team. That means your overhead is not going to be ridiculously low or near zero and people need to understand that. 

But what I would recommend doing instead of focusing on overhead especially if people are trying to beat you up over that is to readjust their focus and reposition the conversation around impact. Right because I've heard these heartbreaking stories about nonprofit organizations who overhead has grown. And people have just kind of run with that as a story and then made them out to look like they were doing something they weren't supposed to be doing. When in reality their overhead was growing because their impact was scaling. And they were making significantly greater contributions over time. So the overhead played a key element in that but it was correlated to what was most important and that was the impact that they were generating. So if people are taking a closer look at your overhead and they really want to know why that number is growing or getting bigger, then I would encourage you to refocus them around where the performance really should be and why that overhead is going up because your impact is going up, ideally even faster. So that's what matters more than most and that should help you avoid this as a trap.

If you'd like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by more than double in less than half the time, I'd encourage you to sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact/.

What I talk about on this episode:

• What jobs to be done is all about
• How it works in practice
• Why it’s important to drive innovation
• The mistakes you make if you skip it
• How your organization should use it
• Read the book - Competing Against Luck

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is a framework referred to as jobs to be done, and how learning more about it can help you with scaling impact. 

Now the jobs to be done framework comes from an author by the name of Clayton Christensen and it's talked about in detail in his book that's called Competing Against Luck. Now, in this book, they talk quite a bit about how people ultimately decide to or not to make the kind of progress that they want to in their lives. That's kind of what you could consider to be a high level description of the jobs to be done framework is all about. It tries to put the emphasis on figuring out how people are determining whether to use or not use certain products in their lives. And it puts it in this context of what job are you hiring that product to do. And if you think about it from this perspective, I think it immediately might seem a little bit confusing but in reality, when you think about the products you use in your lives or whatever it is your laptop, your car, you may or may not have had pair of headphones, I'm just looking around at some of the stuff that I have on my desk here I'm holding a pen, right the two different products that we use, we use them for specific purposes. And that's the point of this framework is to figure out why people ultimately decide to use certain products and also put into context any of the other products they have decided not to use instead of that product. And that's what jobs to be done is all about. 

So this framework can be particularly helpful for you to get a better understanding in who it is you're looking to learn more about so that you can figure out which problems they have that you can help them with right and if we put this through the context of what your organization is likely trying to do in scaling impact. If you're, for example, nonprofit organization, you can think of this, you can leverage the jobs to be done framework to figure out how to best scale impact by first getting a better understanding and who you want to help. That's the place to start. Once we know who that is, right? Maybe that's your nonprofit program client. Maybe that's the members of your organization, whomever it is, we need to be specific about that. Right? Because we need to be talking to the same type of person, as we're figuring out how to leverage this framework to figure out how to scale impact now if we're focused on your nonprofit program, clients might be figuring out how to help them more with whatever the mission is of your organization, like ending asset poverty or helping cure education problems and things like that. If we're focused on your team, it might be around how to enable them to increase their leverage so that they can help more of your clients, right? Maybe we're talking about getting them time back, or enabling them to do more with less, whatever it is, right? Those might be some of your high level objectives. But once you figure it out who you want to help, now you start leveraging this as a framework. By spending time with those individuals and focus on something called storyboarding. That's where you learn all the things of unrelated to what it is is going on at the moment in this individual's life as it pertains to the particular topic or problem that you ultimately want to help them with and that problem is either going to be a major issue or minor issue or somewhere in between for them. But you're only going to get the context that you need by interviewing them, and better understanding the kind of impact that problem may be having on their life. Then once you're talking to them about that you can learn more about how they're trying to solve that problem today.  Is to help them improve, right and there's a lot more about this framework that helps you understand how to leverage it in order to continue to pursue investing in some of these innovative strategies. 

And in particular, because it's what we talk about on this show different ways to help your organization with scaling impact. This is a more advanced product concept, or strategy, but I want to share it with you because if you want to dive in further and learn more about it, I've got resources to share with you there as well too. It can be particularly helpful in establishing the right mindset, which will help your organization think through how to leverage different tools and resources for scaling impact more effectively. It really prevents a number of different problems which might arise if you don't have a framework like this to guide you. Like for example, building a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. We see that a lot in the product world. So if you just start with whatever it is your idea to try to solve because you think that problem may be out there if you're not in the target market and you haven't done this discovery work and you haven't done the storyboarding, then you're probably likely to miss and if you miss, you might invest a lot of time and money into a project which ultimately doesn't deliver the results that you're looking for, as an organization. So if you want to learn more about the jobs to be done framework, and I'd highly encourage that you do so if you're trying to scale impact your nonprofit organization, get a copy of Clayton Christensen's book called Competing Against Luck.

If you'd like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by more than double in less than half the time, I'd encourage you to sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact/.

What I talk about in this episode:

• What storyboarding is all about
• The purpose of storyboarding
• Why you need to know this level of detail
• How to get started at your organization
• When you’ll know you’ve found an opportunity

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey Everyone, Sean here and today, what I want to talk to you more about is a concept called storyboarding and why it's so important to do well, in order to give your organization the best opportunity to scale impact. 

Now the concept of storyboarding, for me comes up when I'm thinking about a topic related to what's called jobs theory, which is another concept you can use. That is helpful for figuring out how to leverage products and particular software products. In order to scale impact. Jobs theory focuses on this concept of better understanding what job the person that you're trying to help is trying to solve, in order for their problem to be resolved. Now storyboarding plays an important element in leveraging jobs theory to achieve success by using different types of products. And that product can be virtual. It can be software and technology in this case, as as is often a lot of the work that I do to help nonprofit organizations with scaling impact. And storyboarding is a concept of really getting to understand that person very well, and what's going on in their life, to better understand anything that might be standing in the way of them leveraging a new product or a solution in order to help solve their problem, which should be related to the impact that your organization is trying to drive. 

Storyboarding is a concept is really figuring out everything that's going on in said individual's life, so that you have a better understanding and what might be standing in their way of leveraging certain solutions. And you can also figure out where there are genuine opportunities for you to take advantage of by helping them in a way that they may not be actively searching for a solution themselves. Some of those instances they have problems where they don't have solutions. Other instances they have problems where they do have solutions, but those solutions are falling short. And you need to know as much as you can about this in order to figure out how to best help them and how to scale impact. So storyboarding is concept of figuring out how to be able to tell from start to finish, everything that's going on in the individual's life that you need to know in order to figure out what they're doing before, during and after. When they're experiencing whatever problem is you're intending to help them solve. That's because there might be something standing in the way of them ultimately leveraging a solution you may want to provide. And if you don't have that context, they'll be prevented from being able to leverage your solution and benefit from the value you're trying to provide for them. 

I'll give you an example. If you'd like to provide some form of tech solution to let's say, some of your nonprofit program clients, and it's only available on a workstation or a laptop or a desktop computer. But your nonprofit clients don't have access to a desktop or a laptop computer they're never going to be able to use your solution. So that's a barrier to them to be able to leverage your product and get the value out of it. Regardless of how well it might ultimately solve their problem. If they can't access it, then that's going to prevent them from being able to use it. That's why in a lot of work that we do, were quite a bit of our nonprofit program clients that don't have access to workstations. We leverage mobile solutions because many of them do have access to cell phones or smartphone technology. As such, we can make products work on that platform. To be able to ensure that more of our clients are able to access that as a digital solution. So this is something that would come up if you were performing storyboarding, where you're asking them all these questions about what they're doing before, during and after, whenever they're experiencing a certain problem. So that you know everything you need to know about what type of experience that you're trying to create for them. And that word experience is very important when leveraged in this context, because it's thought of as something that's comprehensive, right? And it's all encompassing. It's not just a product that I flip on like a switch and I use for a period of time and then you flip it off. That might be how your nonprofit program client ultimately uses your product. But what happens before that and after that is very important. And storyboarding helps you capture that. 

So I want you to dive a little bit deeper into this as a concept and learn it really well because it's going to be very important for figuring out how to scale impact if you only have a piece of the story, then you may be missing a lot of context, which is going to prevent you from having the success that you want and being able to reach the kind of scale and impact that's going to be important for your organization to be successful in helping your clients or your team or whomever it is you'd like to help with what you're trying to solve.

If you'd like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by more than double in less than half the time, I'd encourage you to sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact/.

On this episode I talk about:

• What product management is
• How nonprofit organizations can leverage product management
• The skills that make a good product manager
• How to upskill your team into the role
• What to have them work on to maximize impact

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you more about his the work that I do and how you can leverage it and your organization to scale impact and what I mean by that is product management. 

Now, you may have heard this phrase before, you may be somewhat familiar with this role, or you may have never heard of anything even somewhat related to it and that's okay. This episode is intended to explain to you more about what product management is and how at your nonprofit organization you can leverage the skills of a product manager, both from any of the team members you already have or someone you can potentially add to the team at a future date in order to greater scale impact at your organization. 

So if you're unfamiliar with product management, it often gets confused with more common terminology like project management or a project manager. And it's slightly different than that, but I usually try to explain things whenever I can in the context of another familiar concept that people are aware of like project management, for example. So I'll start there. If you've heard of Project Management before, you're probably somewhat familiar with what goes into managing a project, right? There might be timelines and might be people that might be setting the goals and measuring progress against them that might include managing budgets as well also, everything of and related to that project and the project can really include anything. It doesn't really matter what it is from building anything somewhat tech related to building houses or working on a project at your organization, right, whatever that is. A project manager can oftentimes help you with keeping everything organized and making that progress that you would like to now the way that I like to kind of describe what product management is, is I'm going to I'm going to compare it to your project manager. 

Now whereas a project manager is keeping track of all those things that I mentioned before, the difference between that and a product manager that I would say as a product manager is often doing so exclusively with some type of physical or virtual product. Now in my world, it's mainly these virtual and digital products. So that means software and technology. So when I say that that might be a website, that might be an application, that application can be web based, that application can be mobile, whatever it is, most of the work done in product management is affiliated with managing an application. So a digital product that is either accessible via a web browser or a mobile device that has a specific purpose. 

Now these products you can consider to be essentially almost anything like an app on your phone, like Gmail, for example that you might use to access email to a website application that you might use as well to like Google Documents. For example. Any of these examples these are all considered, quote unquote products. Even though they are digital, they're not physical. They're considered products and product managers organize the efforts related to some of the project management responsibilities, but specifically for these products, as in, they will be managing, basically what features and capabilities to these digital products have today? And what should they have in the future in order to be better for whomever uses them, right? And that's usually the target market customer or the user. In this case, product managers are going out and they're interacting with his target market user to better understand what the needs are that they have that are currently unmet. Then they figure out how do we get functionality built into those products to better address those needs, and solve any of those problems or challenges that those users have. 

So product management and how it relates to your world, which is likely related to running a nonprofit organization. Scaling impact, or having some type of mission driven or social impact objective. Product Management can help in all of these areas by figuring out how your organization can leverage technology and software in order to greater drive impact at scale. Because technology and software are so good at figuring out how to do what you want to do faster, more cost effectively. All of those types of things. What a product manager can likely help you do is figure out how to leverage those tools and resources to make even greater impact in a shorter period of time. So that's what I want you to walk away with from this perspective in terms of really being inspired and thinking about how a product manager or someone with product management skills can help your organization greater drive and scale impact. 

Now, last thing I'll say before I wrap up this episode is that oftentimes you don't necessarily need to go looking externally for this kind of stuff. This is the help that I provide to nonprofit organizations. And if you have any questions, you're more than welcome to always reach out to me and just ask them because I love interacting with folks that want to know more about this topic because I'm very passionate about it myself. But chances are you've had members of your organization that have some maybe even all of these skills already. They just aren't really doing this work or they aren't being referred to in this way. That is an area of opportunity I look for on a regular basis. When I work with nonprofit organizations. I try to figure out who has the capability and or the desire to want to complete this role as a function and is interested in getting better at that moving forward. Then we work on training, and I provide customized training for set individuals so they can kind of step up into that role. Whereas in the beginning, I might. I might do most of the work for me and my team at most of the work, but they're learning along the way. And the idea is for them to ultimately replace us stand up into that product management role. We might do more of a product strategy role, which is something I'll talk about in a future episode. 

So for now, I just want you to get comfortable and familiar with that as a role. That being product management and thinking through the exciting ways in which someone on your team with those skills can help you better drive and create impact at scale.

If you'd like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by more than double in less than half the time, I'd encourage you to sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact/.

On this episode I talk about:

• How to generate revenue by solving your own problem
• Performing discovery with future customers
• Figuring out what to actually build
• How to iterate quickly and cost effectively
• Continuing to make the product better from there

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone Sean here and on today's episode, what I want to walk you through is a real world example of generating revenue by building a product that solves the problem that you or your organization has. 

Now, I've talked about this in a previous episode on I want to walk you through as a real world example. So one of my clients they had a need to want to scale impact by first enrolling as many clients as they could into their process, many more than they had before. Probably a multiple, which is usually what I recommend when we're talking about setting scaling impact level goals. We want to aim for doubling or more as opposed to increasing by something conservatively like 10 or 20%. That helps us think differently, and leverage different resources and strategy to try to reach a much more aggressive goal, which in turn should really help you with scaling impact. 

So in this one example, what we did was we built an enrollment portal to help them move their enrollment process from offline running in person events to online which was much more cost effective, required a lot less time and removed any restrictions, any geographical boundaries that they had in place before. Now they could enroll clients from anywhere as long as they could reach them. Now the results of that were pretty dramatic. What we're able to do was increase their enrollment by greater than 300% in less than half the time. So their team was over the moon about these results, and I was too that was the objective. That's what we were trying to do and we did it which was very exciting. 

Now what I want to talk about is in this instance, now they experienced that dramatic improvement, which is fantastic. But and sometimes when you invest in a project like this or you build a product to solve your own problem, more than likely, other organizations like you have the same problem and can't find that solution anywhere or are trying to cobble together something to provide a better solution than what they have available today. But it's still not great. as such. If you've built something that solves that problem for them, they're going to want to have access to it as well too. So as opposed to thinking through building something like this to help you with improving operational efficiency or scaling impact, like I just described, it can do even more than that. And what I mean by that is if you provide this solution to these other organizations like you, they're more than likely to want to use it and also pay for it because it solves an important problem that they have. And that's how this turns out to generate revenue. And that's what we're doing right now. We're taking that enrollment portal, my client and we're moving it from just them using it to making it available for the rest of the world to use as well too. So we are building it so that other organizations like them can have access to it. And they're ultimately going to be paying for using it because it's going to be solving an important problem for them. 

Now this opens up another entire world of possibilities, because this product is going to be able to be revenue generating now that what we're seeing potentially as maybe an operational efficiency improvement and treated somewhat as an expense is now much more so of an investment. Right? It's helping them scale impact dramatically. And now it's going to start generating revenue for them as well, which is going to become a funding source that they're going to have control over which is going to enable them to continue to even scale impacted even greater levels, which is super exciting. So now this will continue to pay dividends over time as this becomes a funding source of in itself. 

So I want to talk about some of the technical things you can do if you find yourself wanting to invest in a project like this or if you have a product and other organizations are asking you questions about whether or not they can get access to it. You want to perform discovery with these organizations as well to to better understand the context and everything around the problems and challenges they have, which are probably related to yours but might have some slight differences. And that might impact what you build into this product when it's ready for the rest of the world to use as well to you're gonna figure out which tools you might need to integrate, which workflows that are going to be important to capture and more importantly, where to start so that you can start small and don't have to build something big and complicated and expensive. That takes a lot of time in order to get it in their hands as quickly as possible, so that you can start generating revenue sooner rather than later. And then after you've made it to and through this phase, you can continue to make that product experience better by performing discovery with the users better understanding how well it's solving the problems currently, and what other problems they can solve next. 

Because remember, the bottleneck doesn't disappear. It just moves so as you help them alleviate one part of their process. They're going to want to help with you helping them solve the next part of that process.

If you'd like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by more than double in less than half the time, I'd encourage you to sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact/.

On this episode I talk about:

• Focusing on impact
• Performing your own discovery
• Bringing a solution to market
• Measuring the results
• Sellng it to others like you

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is the advantages of focusing on solving your own problem when it comes to scaling impact and leveraging technology and software in order to do it. 

Now it can be tricky to achieve product success and I talk a lot about that on this show. But leveraged appropriately software and technology can really help you scale impact at an entirely different level than you may have before. If you've been leveraging people or mainly services.

In order to take full advantage of what software and digital products are capable of. You really need to have a tight value proposition as you need to know what specific problem you're solving or which specific target market and how that solution is better than however they were trying to solve those problems today. I talk a lot about that, but in this particular instance, I'm referring to this as a sort of design pattern, which is common terminology you'll hear about if you're ever reading up on much in terms of product development or software engineering. It's essentially a pattern in which to follow where you're trying to solve a particular common problem. There oftentimes becomes a pattern that becomes developed that many can use and replicate in their own projects in order to prevent themselves from having to kind of reinvent the wheel when they have to solve a similar problem so it can speed up the progress terms of what it is you're trying to accomplish.

This case I want to talk about the advantages of solving your own problem. Now if you want to leverage this strategy the way you should do it is you should first figure out how you can do so in order to maximize your impact, right, because that's the number one objective.

Once you know that, you can perform the discovery that I've been talking about, but you can perform it within your own organization as opposed to needing to get access to anyone external to your organization. You could perform it with your own team and figure out what is slowing them down what are the biggest problems and challenges they are having in order to try to provide the kind of impact that you would like to to your clients, your nonprofit program clients.

The results of this discovery should yield an opportunity for you to bring a better or an improved solution to market when compared with however your team is going about solving those problems today. So you may be able to find where they're losing most of their time or what challenge is standing in the way of them making even more progress presenting to you the opportunity in this case. 

Now, after you have identified how you would like to solve that problem in a better way with a form of a software or a digital product. You can build and bring that solution to market and then measure the results. Did it ultimately achieve what you had set out to achieve? If so, that's fantastic. And now you can look for other areas where you can expand the reach of this value proposition to others that might need it. One great example of that is other organizations like yours, more than likely, if you found a problem within your own organization, chances are high that in other organizations like yours, they have the same problem. They also are more than likely leveraging a similar existing solution, meaning that there's an opportunity to sell to them as well. So this means that what might initially feel like an expense because you're investing in building something, but for your own team, in terms of helping you become what you might consider to be only operationally more efficient, which is still most of the time a worthwhile investment depending on the numbers and how big of a benefit you're going to get. What you ultimately find out is if you stumble upon something that is also a problem for others, like you as well, too. You can take what you built, turn it around and start selling it to other organizations like yours, giving you the opportunity to turn what you might have thought of as an expense into more of an investment because now you can start generating revenue from it as you are selling that solution to others as well to so you can get a even more significant return than just the operational efficiency improvement. You can also bring in revenue and create an entire revenue stream from this. That revenue can then be reinvested back into your program as a funding source. to again help you greater scale impact. 

So there's a lot of benefits to solving your own problem. I wanted to kind of reiterate that process. And in a future episode potentially. Tomorrow I'm going to talk more about an example of where I've leveraged this design pattern in order to help a nonprofit client of mine better scale impact and go from operational efficiency improvement to start generating revenue for their organization, giving them the opportunity to reinvest it back into the programs and continue scaling impact.

If you'd like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by more than double in less than half the time, I'd encourage you to sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact/.

On this episode I talk about:

• What the 'problem worth solving' framework is all about
• How I followed the process to find a real problem worth solving
• The target market we selected for discovery (and why)
• What the results of each step look like in practice
• What to do after you find a problem worth solving

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here. Today what I want to talk to you about is a real world example of the episode I've recorded and shared yesterday, called problems worth solving. And in that episode, I walked you through how to identify a problem worth solving. Today I'm going to talk you through a real world example where I've used that framework in order to identify one. 

So if you haven't listened to that previous episode, and you don't know what I mean, when I refer to problem solving, go back and listen to that episode first, because this one will make a lot more sense. Okay, so we talked about the framework Right? Which is starting with a target market, talking to them about their problems and challenges, better understanding how they're solving those problems and challenges today are what I refer to as the existing solution, and then getting a better handle for the impact of that problem or challenge in terms of what is it costing said individual? And as such, having context around all of the answers to those questions, gives us a better idea to be able to understand whether or not there's enough opportunity there. It makes sense for us to invest in a solution to improve the value that the target market customer or user or client is ultimately going to get, meaning that we can move the needle and scale impact with a solution like that before we invest big time and money building something. So that's an overview of the process. 

This example that I'm gonna share with you comes from the nonprofit client that I worked with to help scale impact. Ultimately, we built a software application to specifically address the challenge that we found with a specific target market. In this case, it was their non profit program clients, it was the clients that were enrolling in their program and the value or a specific challenge that they clients were experiencing. When they were trying to get the value out of the program. 

Now in this case, the program was to help them build essentially financial assets and wealth to help pull themselves out of poverty and help an underrepresented population that struggles with challenges related to the clients in the program. When people are enrolled into the program and do well in it and they graduate from it, they've been able to make pretty dramatic transformation. So the value is definitely there. However, there are issues related to under utilization and people getting to and through the program in particular. So then my nonprofit client wanted to specifically see what they could do about understanding the challenges that the clients themselves were having, so that we could figure out what we may be able to do to scale impact for them. So I invested in performing discovery with the nonprofit program clients, which translated to one on one conversations with them so I can better understand the challenges and I could go through the discovery process with them. 

Ultimately, what I found out when doing so was that one of their biggest challenges was related to not having enough time with their coaches. Now this program that they're enrolled in, it requires them to meet with and spend time with financial coaches so they can learn more about how they can build a better financial future for themselves by improving their credit, paying down debt. Learning about all these things, to the time with the coaches was very valuable to them. The problem was they weren't getting enough of it. And that started to lead me down a path of understanding what the impact of this challenge was related to them sometimes losing focus and losing progress in the program and sometimes becoming disengaged, ultimately leading to clients dropping out of the program, which is the worst case scenario, when we're talking about this particular program. So this problem had real negative impact associated with it. 

The next thing to do was to talk more about the existing solution, how are they solving this problem today? Well as it turns out, the clients were simply waiting for their next touch point with their coaches. However, the problem here was that the coaches were overwhelmed, and they were unable to spend a lot of time with each client. So the meetings were happening rather infrequently. So the meetings may only happen every three months or so, which meant that there was a lot of time in between the meetings between the clients and coaches. So the clients would have these situations where they could really use the guidance of the coaches or they wanted to ask a quick question of the coach, because they might be, you know, signing up for a loan on bad terms or putting something on credit, purchasing something that maybe more like an impulse purchase that they didn't really need but wanted in the moment, but they, you know, had those moments that we all do and they ultimately made a financial decision without the guidance of their coach which set them back in their program. So this also spoke to the impact but ultimately, the existing solution gave me a better idea for what the level of performance was for how they were trying to solve that problem today, and they were just waiting for the next meeting, which was not catching all these instances in between where they could lose progress. They can become demotivated, they can forget about all the positive momentum that they had already made. And that would ultimately lead to them becoming disengaged, and for some of them dropping out the program. 

So plenty of negative impact here, and plenty of opportunity to improve so that I wanted to share that with you because that's a real world example of ultimately what we invested in from a discovery perspective, in order to better understand whether or not there was a problem worth solving here, and we believe that there was so ultimately we moved forward to building a product to solve this problem. And I'm gonna talk about what that was in a future episode probably tomorrow. So stay tuned if you want to listen to the next installment in this series where I'll walk you through, ultimately what we did and the product that we brought to market to help these clients with this problem and provide them with a better solution.

If you'd like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by more than double in less than half the time, I'd encourage you to sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact/.

On this episode I share:

• What is a 'Problem Worth Solving'
• How to identify problems worth solving
• Why validating the problem is so important
• The process to build to get these answers
• The questions to ask to validate your problem

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I want to talk to you about is a concept that I've mentioned on the show before that I refer to as identifying problems worth solving. 

Now, when I say problems worth solving, what I mean is looking for the best area of opportunity for which it makes sense for your organization to invest in a product solution. And if you found what I refer to is a problem worth solving, then it will make sense to make this investment, otherwise you might not be able to achieve the results that you're ultimately looking for. 

So why is it so important to find what I refer to as problems worth solving? Well, I'm going to start start by defining essentially what it is and to me it's something that is going to give you the kind of potential to achieve the product success that you're looking for. And it's so important to identify one before you start building solutions because if you haven't already done this, then your product solution or however you're trying to innovate is unlikely to offer to your clients, or whomever you're building that solution for the kind of value that you think it will. And it's instead probably not going to be very successful. There's a lot of that out in the product world. Many organizations that have invested in technology and software, especially from a customer perspective, have struggled to gain the kind of traction that they would like to because they underestimated this step in the process. So this is a really important element of figuring out how to get a product off the ground. 

So how do you identify a problem worth solving? Well, I've developed a process over a series of years of investing further and researching in pretty great detail, product strategy, product research, product management, all of these concepts. I've read all the books, and I've done a lot of the testing in building product companies of my own. That's how I know in terms of what I've done, what works and what doesn't work, so I can kind of shortcut the process for you and instead share my system that has worked pretty consistently as I've done this for other nonprofit organizations potentially like yours. And the first step of the process to identify who we're looking to help. You need to have a pretty specific, as I refer to it, target market in terms of who you want to interview. That's because different groups of people or different users are likely to have different problems. So the more consistent you can make that the better. And I'm going to share a mini example in this episode, but a more detailed, thorough example for how I followed this process to identify an area of opportunity for which we've built a successful product for a nonprofit client of mine that is helping them scale impact. 

In this case, let's assume you want to help your clients or clients that are the members of your nonprofit program. So if you have access to a number of them, that are interested in meeting with you, what you can do is you can interview them and invest in the part of the process that I refer to as customer discovery, which is a one on one conversation to better understand what a day in the life is like for them so that you can better understand their problems and challenges and look for areas of opportunity to potentially invest in a future product and help scale impact by solving some of their top problems and challenges. And that's the first step in the process as you're interviewing them. You want to understand what are their current challenges, what is slowing down the kind of progress that they would like to make what's standing in the way of them being more successful in whatever it is they'd like to do. That's a great place to begin the conversation and then as you identify areas that you believe you may be able to help them because some you may be able to help them some maybe not yet. You really want to focus on the ones that you think are closest to the type of value you're attempting to provide for them or where you're looking to help them the most. 

As you understand that the next series of questions and the next section of this conversation should focus on. What I've talked about on the show before is the existing solutions. And when I say that what I mean is, how are they going about solving whatever that problem is they just mentioned to you today. That's very important, because that's what's going to be that's what you will be compared against if you're thinking of proposing a unique solution different than however they're solving that problem currently. And that's also what you're going to need to be able to be as it needs to be faster, cheaper, easier to use whatever it is, you need to figure out how to be better than however they're doing it today. Otherwise, they're not going to use your solution. That's another mistake. That's often made by nonprofit organizations trying to scale impact with products you need to understand that very well. So that's the second series of questions and related to that section of the conversation. 

The third is what is the level of performance. So if they have a form of an existing solution to try to solve whatever it is their top problem or the one that you'd like to help solve for them, how well is however they're solving that today working for them. And then try to break this down as much as you can into something tangible that you can measure. So whatever that problem is, out of 10 times in which they experience it. How many times does the existing solution or however they're solving that today? How many times out of that 10 doesn't solve the problem, right? Is it solving it? Seven or eight times out of 10? Or is it solving it two or three times out of 10? This gives you a great perspective for how effective that current solution is that existing solution is. And again, that's another great baseline for you to compare your solution to terms of if you are deciding whether or not to build a solution to this problem in particular. 

From there, it's all about better understanding the area of opportunity to innovate, as I refer to it at times as well too. And some of this data will provide you with some of that insight if the existing solution is rather ineffective. And those numbers are on the lower end than the strength or the area of opportunity to innovate. Here's probably going to be higher, as will your clients interest in trying to solve that problem in a different more unique way. And this is what we've done it for a nonprofit organization in terms of building them an application to help them with what is a financial coaching program. And I'm gonna talk about that in greater detail in a future episode, but you can for now focus on this as a system and consider running a series of interviews that I refer to as customer discovery with whomever it is you'd like to build a potential solution for. In this case, let's assume that your nonprofit clients to better understand the problems and challenges they have today, how they're solving them today, and how effective that current is so that you can get a better understanding before you invest. Too much in any form of a solution. What the area of opportunity is and what that looks like in terms of what type of potential you can expect from a potential solution that you might offer your clients to solve this ...

On this episode I talk about:

• What the 'existing solution' is all about
• Why it's so important for you to understand it well
• How to uncover the existing solution in discovery
• An example of a non-obvious existing solution
• How to get started with discovery

If you’d like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit by more than double in less than half the time, sign up for my free 5 day email course (https://nxtstep.io/impact/)

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone, Sean here and today what I'm going to talk to you about is a concept that I refer to as the existing solution and why it's important for you to beat that in order to figure out how to be successful with products when it comes to scaling impact. 

Now, over time, I've developed a framework for figuring out how to go from zero all the way to and through a successfully implemented product that helps you scale impact. There's a number of steps along the way, but the important part of the process, when you're starting there, is to make sure you're investing in what I refer to as customer discovery. Now, when you're investing in customer discovery, that's when you're meeting with your clients or your team members or other organizations like yours, or whomever it is you would like to solve a problem when you're meeting with them. You need to learn more about what their problems are, how those problems are impacting their current daily lives and routine, what's the pain, what is the impact of those problems for your target market users. 

The next step goes into what I refer to is the existing solution. Now the existing solution in this case is whatever they're doing today to currently solve that problem, regardless of how effective that solution may be, and that is a really key element to this as well, too. So as you're doing this discovery you're gonna get to this point where you stumbled upon a problem that's causing a certain amount of pain or causing a certain amount of impact, negative impact, and you're going to be considering proposing a solution to resolve some of that impact, ideally, as much of it as possible. But in terms of figuring out what type of potential the solution that you're proposing is ultimately going to have you need to better understand that the existing solution or how they are trying to solve that problem today. 

I'll give you an example to make it easier to understand. Most of us are probably familiar with the tax preparation software called TurboTax. It was built by a company called Intuit who makes a number of different software products related to finance and accounting, but I'm going to focus on TurboTax in this case. Now, you may have seen or heard of this story before, but when the folks that were involved with building TurboTax in the beginning, are telling the story from a product management perspective, in terms of how they came up with the solution and ultimately why the feel the product has been so successful. They credited to what they were comparing it against in terms of the existing solution for their users at the time and inevitably when they're telling this story. They ask the question to an audience or whomever they're presenting it to. And they ask, essentially, the simple question of what was TurboTax competing against at the time to kind of see what kind of answers they get. Inevitably the answers they usually get or some other type of defunct software product e-file this and e-file that which is usually some obscure reference to what is now a defunct software product that didn't go the distance. And the punchline here, seemingly, almost underwhelming is that it was pen and paper. What TurboTax was competing against at the time was pen and paper. The reason why they were competing against that was because the vast majority of people at the time, were filling out returns by hand. 

So TurboTax didn't need to compete against anyone else trying to either solve the same problems or try to solve this problem with software. They knew that they were competing against people filling out returns manually by hand. And that's what they needed to be better than and that perspective was really important. And it's often lost on people trying to scale impact with products or software. Because what they're not understanding is the hoops that folks are going to have to jump through or the habits that they're going to need to form in order to be able to pick up their solution and use it consistently to get that kind of value that you think it can provide. 

So I wanted to talk about this as a concept. It is a very important one. When you're investing in discovery when you're trying to find what I call problems worth solving. You really need to be laser focused and better understand everything about whoever it is you're building for what is going on in their life in terms of how are they currently solving that problem today, and that could be for your clients. That could be for people that work on your team that could be for other organizations, whomever it is, you're building for it you need to really understand very well how it is they're trying to solve that problem today, in order to evaluate the kind of potential and opportunity your proposed solution may have as well as what is the likelihood that it is ultimately going to succeed because you'll be able to measure the difference between how significantly different they doing it today is between how you are proposing they may do it in the future by leveraging your product solution.

If you'd like to learn how to scale impact at your nonprofit organization by more than double in less than half the time, I'd encourage you to sign up for my free 5 day email course at https://nxtstep.io/impact/.