Unit 3
Assignment for David Eaves' Lean Startup Class: Product Tear-Down (Used to teach Unit 3)
What is this page?
This is a detailed breakdown of how David Eaves, a Lecturer at the University College London's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (UCL IIPP), teaches the contents of Unit 3 of the open access syllabus developed by Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age. It is assigned after this class, and before this one.
This page is part of a series of twenty-five classes that David developed originally for the Harvard Kennedy School's master and executive education programs, where he taught for eight years, and are now taught at UCL's master and applied learning programs.
We believe presenting diverse ways to teach the syllabus will help others adopt and teach the material in various contexts. See here how Konstanz University's Prof Ines Mergel teaches the same unit.
Who is this page for?
This page was developed for university faculty who teach public administrators or master's levels students in public policy and public administration. This material may also be suitable for teaching to upper year undergraduates.
This Class' Learning Objectives
The main goal of this assignment is to provide students with a real experience of analyzing a product or service through the lens of both a user and a designer.
The secondary goals are:
To internalize the value of user testing and experience as a way to get insights for future improvements
To become familiar with the Value Proposition Design Canvas as a tool to evaluate and communicate about a product or service
The assignment
Background notes on the assignment for the instructor
David's class has 110 students from 35+ countries and a range of professional experiences. One pedagogical challenge is to enable students to write about a product with which they all have a shared experience. A shared context saves time by eliminating the need for students to explain the service or product in their assignment to their classmates and instead focus on the course ideas and concepts. For this class KNET - the Harvard Kennedy Schools intranet used by students, staff and faculty provides that shared context. David finds that university-based examples level the playing field in terms of access and understanding. That said, courses with a more homogenous group (say public servants from a single ministry or country) can benefit from letting students choose actual government services confident the group has a shared understanding of the service. This exercise works best with services that - like many government services - serve different user groups. KNET, for example, serves students, staff and faculty, who may have different needs. For this assignment the product manager and the key administrative user of KNET were generous enough to be interviewed about the strengths and weaknesses of the service, as well as the costs and constraints in updating the system or changing businesses processes around it. This is particularly useful in both providing students with more context and building empathy for those managing the system.
Assignment Description, for Students
1) Complete a digital product or service tear-down. Experience the use of a digital product or service. In short, describe:
what are the features of the product or service?
who are the users and what their objectives might be?
what are the parts of the user journey and what is the average time (or amount of clicks) to go through each step and how users feel throughout the process?
what information is needed from users in each step?
what is good and bad about it from a design thinking perspective?
Deliverable: One to five slides with screenshots and add "text bubbles" pointing to features or designs that you think help or hinder users.
2. Complete a Value Proposition Canvas (VPC) template. For the product or service analyzed above, complete the customer profile-side of the Value Proposition canvas (pages 10-25 of the Value Proposition Design book). Deliverable: One page or slide with the VPC template. If there are multiple user profiles, pick one to be analyzed and make sure to point out which are the others.
(Optional) Presentation to stakeholders. You are part of a team responsible for revamping the product or service you analyzed above. Your goal is to convince the decision makers to prioritize you recommendations. Use the VPC template to prepare a 5 minute presentation to achieve this goal.
Successful Examples of Student Outputs
Read "Is It Me You Are Looking For? Leveraging and Improving the Search Bar to Improve Students’ Experience on KNET", from Lucas Kutzmuller.
Read “KNET is 98% there, which means I can’t trust it at all”, from Adam Swartzbaugh.
Read "Improving the user experience on KNET", from Carolyn Cannella.