Mentorship made simple

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How we made finding a mentor and offering mentorship easier for busy professionals.
01
Background

Project background

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Duing this project, I led product design and user research efforts through a pivot from Graspie, a employee training app, to Latte, an app that supports professional development by connecting mentees with mentors.
Throughout this project I worked closely with Latte's founder, Derrick and our software engineer, Baily. Over the course of 6 months, we went from a failed product with no customer to a new, research-backed product in beta testing that had attracted its first customers and helped the business secure additional VC investment.
Company:
Latte (formerly Graspie)
Timeline:
6 months
Role:
Product Designer
Team:
Software Engineer, Founder

The impact

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Shipped
Beta version for pilot
The end-to-end experience was implemented and released in test flight
$
200k
More investment
From existing investors who were enthusastic about the new direction of the app
Contracts
Signed
The start up signed its first customer contract based on the new concepts
02
The challenge

Finding a problem we could solve

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Upon starting the project, I quickly learned that Graspie was struggling to attract customers as an employee training app because it had been built in a vacuum, with no research to define its target audience or to understand the needs of its customers and users.
After performing competitive analysis and interviewing HR stakeholders to better understand the market landscape and needs of customers, it became clear that the enterprise solution customers needed was far more sophisticated than what we could build on our tight budget and timeline. We needed to find a problem we could solve.
"It became clear that the enterprise solution customers needed was far more sophisticated than what we could build on our tight budget and timeline. "
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Where we started

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Solution without clear problem
Graspie was an idea, not a solution to a validated problem. Thus the existing app had become a hodge-podge of non functional features.
Limited time & resources
Graspie had used most of its initial capital and needed to start proving value to investors and fast in order to receive additional investment.
No customer traction
Without industry expertise or a deep understanding of users Graspie hadn't attracted or maintained any customers in it's 3-year lifetime.
Where we started: "Graspie" was a half implemented B2B product for onboarding and training new employees and was struggling to find customers. We scrapped it and started from scratch.
03
New RESEARCH QUESTION

How can we help people develop skills they need to acheive their career goals

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Above all else, as an instructional designer, Latte's founder was passionate about helping people develop soft skills to progress in their careers. In taking a step back, we agreed to reframe the research question more broadly to focus on how we could help professionals to develop skills to achieve their career goals.
I distributed a surveys in Slack channels for various professionals and interviewed 8 participants who were actively employed or looking for work.
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"...we agreed to reframe the research question more broadly to focus on how we could help professionals to develop skills to achieve their career goals"
04
Insights

Mentorship as an opportunity, access as a problem

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From my research, we learned that while skill development is important, what most people felt they desperately needed, was "mentorship." This, they defined as someone who could help them decide what skills to focus on, help them navigate career ambiguity, and provide a sense of human connection.
The problem was that, while mentorship is critical to professional development, it can be difficult to find. Especially for those who need it most.
"While mentorship is critical to professional development, it can be difficult to find."
According to interviewees, mentorship plays a critical role at various points in the skill development journey

Barriers to finding mentors

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I used affinity mapping to group the insights from interviews into the most prominent pain points participants experienced in the pursuit of mentorship.  
01
Asking for help is hard
Participants felt uncomfortable reaching out to prospective mentors. It could be hard to read whether the other person wanted to help.
02
Network size & employment status
Participants who had small networks, were early in their careers, or unemployed tended to have particular difficulty finding mentors
03
Administrative burden & time
According to participants, the time spent on cold outreach, email exchanges, and scheduling intro calls leads to overwhelm
Affinity mapping interview quotes and insights helped me identify the most common barriers in access to mentorship.
05
Users

Understanding mentors & mentees

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Based on the interviews and surveys, those who needed mentorship most tended to be those navigating ambiguity in their careers - recent grads, entrepreneurs, and professionals switching careers. Based on this insight, I developed two mentee personas and a detailed customer journey map. I also considered the spectrum of where users currently find mentors.
The mentors I interviewed were usually mentees of other mentors so they saw mentorship as an opportunity to give back, strengthen their network, and develop leadership skills.
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"Those who needed mentorship most tended to be those navigating ambiguity in their careers -recent grads, entrepreneurs, and professionals switching careers"
I developed user personas for mentors and mentees drawing on common characteristics and themes from user interviews.
I created a detailed user journey for mentees, which we used later on in a design sprint to identify user needs and product opportunities.
06
Ideation

Sprinting to the MVP

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After pitching our new direction to investors, Latte received some good news, and along with it, an accelerated deadline for an MVP. We had less than a month to translate our research insights into a fully functional MVP to secure a pilot with a potential customer.
Given our tight timeline, ensuring we were aligned on the near term product vision, as well as the longer term strategic goals was essential. I planned a 4-day remote design sprint with some brand visioning exercises baked in.
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Sprint questions
We kicked off the sprint by generating questions that needed to be answered for Latte to succeed. Many of these hinged on businesses model and strategy and couldn't be answered during the sprint, but they provided a jumping off point for Derrick.
Putting HMW's on the map
Mapping the ideal mentee and mentor experiences helped us see them as fluid categories, and in doing so, create an MVP with a single set of features that accommodates the needs of both user categories.
Putting HMW's on the map
Mapping the ideal mentee and mentor experiences helped us see them as fluid categories, and in doing so, create an MVP with a single set of features that accommodates the needs of both user categories.
Speed sketching
At the conclusion of the sprint,  Derrickl and I each created a series of sketches to review together. This helped ensure we were aligned on the high level vision for the product before I began creating more detailed user flows.
07
Designs

From zero to MVP

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We were under time pressure to produce a fully functional MPV in less than one month, so I spent the next week and a half translating the storyboard and user flow into a high fidelity prototype that accounted for the end-to-end mentee and mentor experiences.

In retrospect, I wish I had aligned with our engineer on using an existing component library such as material-UI. This would have helped us better manage components and styles from the get-go.
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08
Testing & iTerating

Making good better

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Due to our tight timeline, we had to start implementing before testing with users, which wasn't ideal. However, this allowed us to test a more realistic version of the experience.
From conducting moderated usability tests with 5 mentees and mentors, I learned:
  • For mentees, key pieces of information for match making were absent, including years of experience, areas of expertise, and social proof of a mentor's helpfulness
  • Mentors desired a greater sense of control over their schedule in order to feel comfortable making themselves available for sessions
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Introducing Latte

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Help when you need it
Latte removes all of the administrative burden of scheduling for mentees and mentors by allowing mentors to set available timeslots, using scheduling rules and calendar integration, achieved with Calendly's API.
A team, not a network
Users can build meaningful relationships overtime by adding mentees and mentors to their Team. Upon joining each other's teams, users can communicate freely via Latte's in-app chat and video calling features.
A team, not a network
Users can build meaningful relationships overtime by adding mentees and mentors to their Team. Upon joining each other's teams, users can communicate freely via Latte's in-app chat and video calling features.
Relationship coaching built in
As we learned from interviews, mentorship has it's own set of best practices. We incorporated coaching into the experience to help mentees put their best foot forward and to ensure that mentors receive the appreciation they deserve.
09
Results & reflections

Strong signals

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For me, this project was an exercise in navigating ambiguity on every side, and using design thinking to create clarity along the path from where we started to where we wanted to be.
While Latte still has many questions to answer as it scales, throughout this project, we were able to find answers to the most foundational questions of what problem Latte is solving, and for who. Moreover, we started to see strong signals from both potential customers and investors that we were on the right track:
  • Based on the prototype for the new app, Latte secured $200k in additional investment for continued development.
  • The beta version of the app brought in Latte's first contract with a big-name customer for an initial pilot program.
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