AARP
American Association of Retired Persons
Building a business case for creating a Media Innovation Lab inside the US' largest nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering retired Americans.
Consulting, Product Strategy, Research
The Why?
The media landscape is rapidly evolving with the advent of new technologies and changing consumer behaviors. No matter their age?. To stay competitive in this dynamic environment, AARP identified it is crucial for them to support innovation and experimentation more than ever before. Establishing a Media Innovation Lab can provide numerous benefits, including fostering creativity, driving strategic growth, enhancing product development, and increasing competitive advantage.
"Innovation is crucial for acquiring competitive advantage in dynamic and complex environments (Kalay & Lynn, 2015). The effective management of innovation, however, has been observed as a difficult challenge because innovation is experimental and unstructured in nature, follows a dynamic trial and error process, and often lacks formalization."
Scope & timeline
Our end goal was to build a business case that would emphasize the benefits a Media Innovation Lab would bring to them, which later would be presented in front of AARP's C-suite members for further buy-in.
Timeline: 3 weeks
The teams
1 Product Strategist
1 Product Designer
1 UX Researcher
Tools & platforms
Miro
Slack
PowerPoint (yeey!)
& AARP's
Director, AARP Media Strategy
Goal alignment workshop
Planning ahead
We found out during discovery and goal alignment that AARP had already invested in an Innovation Lab recently, that was acting as a startup accelerator/incubator, organizing pitch competitions. The new proposed Media Lab would have a different focus including its mission, key activities, and organizational structure. This structure would form from existing and new departments that would evolve and commit to becoming a center of excellence within their content and media group.
Goal alignment outcome
Each of these activities would help us reach a smaller goal and get us closer to our desired outcome.
Tasks & responsibilities
For me, this was one of the first engagements focusing more on product strategy rather than UX, two distinct but interconnected concepts within the realm of product development. I was exposed to new things (to me) that in the past someone else had to "take care of". With the help of an experienced product strategist, I managed to navigate through the workshops and tasks, as she walked me through the entire product strategy process, setting clear expectations of what's expected from us and the client.
We had a clear list of tasks & responsibilities defined, and a few workshops lined up together with the client.
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SWOT Analysis
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Business Case Development or Refinement
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Media Lab Discovery Process Design
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Operationalization Process Design
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Opportunity Map (Identifying Value)
Research Tasks, “Innovative Media & Content”
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Competitive Analysis
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Organizational Design & Ops Structure
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Anti-patterns
Cover story - Workshop
The purpose of the Cover Story workshop is to think expansively about an ideal future state for the organization; it’s an exercise in visioning. The object of the game is to suspend all disbelief and envision a future state that is so stellar that it landed your organization on the cover of a well-known magazine.
Following a template, with a few keywords and phrases and some inspirational examples, we started drafting a vision statement for the Media Innovation Lab.
AARP Media Innovation Lab is exploring relevant emerging technologies to develop, grow, and nurture meaningful engagements/experiences with their different communities in their mission to foster connection and deliver inspiration as they age.
Market research
As we were engaged with the client in these workshops, working on identifying strengths and weaknesses, our researcher was covering the other end, bringing a lot of valuable insights from business & market analysis, studying trends, and identifying opportunities & threats.
With all the ingredients ready, a SWOT analysis was put together and we started working on an Opportunity map to refine the wall of ideas that have gone through our minds in the past week, adding them to the ones that surfaced during the research phase.
SWOT Analysis
Outcome
As we had plenty of data by now, we started to outline the structure of the final deck and focus on the storytelling part.
How we display the content of this deck of slides would have to communicate effectively, inspire action, influence decisions, differentiate the product, and, ideally, overcome any resistance to change.
Presentation
Decisions are often made based on data, market trends, and user feedback. Storytelling complements these quantitative aspects by providing context and meaning.
Takeaways
The key ingredient during this project was having a great team synergy formed in such a short timeframe, including with our client, even if we never met before.
Envisioning this project better than any of us could, the client managed to answer our strategic questions and add valuable insights throughout the workshops which helped us shape & define clear concepts and deliverables that would reflect in a perfectly tailored pitch deck.
Sometimes it's good to have the client as a team member!
