top of page

New product & service innovation

Deliverable

A clearly defined, tested, and executable offering with  proven potential to drive beneficiary outcomes - and justify your funders’ investment. 

What to expect

All projects go through the same arc: discovery, ideation, prototyping/testing, launching/learning. 

 

 

 

Case study

The challenge

Non-profit Jesse Tree has a mission to prevent homelessness and eviction. Their primary service is providing emergency funds to tenants going through eviction.

 

Their emergency assistance program is well respected, but they aren’t satisfied with that offering alone. They see an opportunity to intervene further upstream to keep tenants from entering eviction in the first place. 

 

Jesse Tree piloted an online workshop series focused on empowering tenants with skills that are known to promote housing stability: rights education, financial planning, and mediation. Completion rates were low, however, and the project was paused. 

 

I engaged with Jesse Tree to define and validate a solution for upstream intervention that would attract tenants and lead to stronger outcomes in tenant housing stability. 

 

Kickoff: Alignment & goals setting - 1 week

The initial step was to establish project goals and operating assumptions, aligned with all stakeholders.

Deliverables:

  • Measurable, outcome-oriented goal

  • Operating assumptions 

  • All goals & assumptions documented in a project brief with client sign off

 

Over the course of two conversations, we quickly established a goal and a set of operating assumptions that set the stage for everything that followed:

Discovery: Deep diving the tenant problem space - 1.5 months

Discovery is all about learning what people are trying to accomplish and what barriers get in their way.

All solutions evolve from those insights.

Deliverables:

  • User empathy map including tenant needs, barriers, and advantages, as well as ecosystem solutions and gaps

  • A prioritized set of tenant problems to solve

  • A from/to vision, from the tenant's perspective

 

This project's discovery included:

  • Exploring the original workshops and what did / didn’t work, through data analysis, surveys, and interviews.

  • Directly observing the work Jesse Tree does to prevent clients in eviction from getting into crisis again

  • Investigating what worked for similar organizations in other regions 

 

Major insights uncovered:

  • Jesse Tree case managers working with clients in eviction create “Housing Stability Plans” that have good success in preventing clients from re-entering eviction. 

  • The most significant supports for tenants in a position of instability - but not yet facing eviction - are tactics for improving financial stability; knowledge of their tenant rights; and overcoming the shame of asking for help.

  • Pilot workshop learnings: 

    • One workshop resonated above all others: Tenant rights and empowerment.

    • The timing of the workshops made them hard to attend

    • Personal instruction was much appreciated

 

Solutioning: Ideating & testing new approaches: 2 months

Ideation & test plan: 2 weeks

Deliverable:  An exciting, outcomes-led vision; a detailed, executable test plan

 

A stakeholder workshop was held to digest insights, map needs, brainstorm new solution ideas, and narrow to the most promising ideas. "Promising" was defined as: high potential to overcome tenant barriers to housing stability. 

 

I then developed a full service proposal consisting of 4 new pillars:

  • Maintain the core idea of tenant education for upstream intervention, but significantly re-imagine it to bring it directly into the community;

  • Add a peer support pillar inspired by programs like Year Up and microfinance circles;

  • Make landlords part of the solution;

  • Add lightweight but tangible course completion incentives.

The proposal also re-imagined how to make the courses discoverable on Jesse Tree's website.

 

This is a big vision, and big visions need to be carefully tested and built in small validation phases. 

Essentially, we treat visions as hypotheses, and test and adjust them before we fall too much in love with them.

 

Accordingly, I created a lean testing plan to rapidly and inexpensively test into the riskiest assumptions right away.

Testing: 1.5 months

Launching now! The first test will be run within the next month - stay tuned for details


 

Launching: Build, measure, learn

This stage starts in the next quarter - return here for updates!

Website content_ images (1).jpg
Website content_ images (2).jpg
Website content_ images (3).jpg
needs map.png
Website content_ images (4).jpg
bottom of page