This week we met to discuss our list of How Might We questions based on the experiences and insights that we gained through our interviews: • How might we make testing and renting gear easier? • How might we improve the food efficiency at the ski lodge? • How might we increase visitorship to ski resorts? • How might we reduce the perception of injury/risk on the slopes? • How might we improve destination skiing? • How might we create all-inclusive ski trips? • How might we improve scheduling and coordination between groups of friends planning a ski trip together? We will use this to help decide on additional solutions where we can add value, beyond the ones we came up with last week when looking at the customer journey. We also wanted to see where we could provide the most incentive to stakeholders. This would be important because it would help us gauge how viable a potential solution was depending on how easily we could get a stakeholder or player to help. We did this by individually listing the players and stakeholders in the ski/snowboard ecosystem on separate post its and categorizing them based on their function in relation to the central figure, the customer. Once the ecosystem had been established, we tested out how our value-add solutions would fit into the ecosystem. We did this by color coding the three possible solutions we had come up with last week, and matching them with the appropriate stakeholder or player that we felt would benefit from it. Based on this, we could visibly see which stakeholders from both the player and customer side we could safely ignore and which ones we would potentially focus on. We also briefly discussed how our solutions would differentiate ourselves in this current ecosystem, ie a more upscale bus service with wifi, a planning app that provided minor discounts at every step (which would add up for the whole trip), or a gear pick up service that has not been established yet or tried before.
With the end of the meeting in sight, it was selfie time!
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This week we made major progress by mapping out the customer journey related to skiing. Together we identified the main stages in a ski trip where people may have logistical issues:
The areas with the most issues appear to be planning the trip, navigation and carrying gear at each of the different phases. This led us to brainstorm 3 potential places we could help (there could be many more!)
1. A trip planning app that integrated doodle poll to pick dates with your friends, airbnb/vrbo to reserve a place to stay, lift ticket purchasing, maps to direct you and see where your friend are, an alarm clock to wake everyone up and more! 2. A transportation service from SF to Tahoe that is better than the existing options - almost being the Southwest for ski trips. 3. A pickup service for gear - somehow we'd collect the gear from SF (your house, a locker, sports basement??) and have it at the mountain waiting for you. This would remove the gear from the customers hands through most of the journey. This week our main focus was getting out and talking to people about their experiences skiing/snowboarding. We wanted to understand what their pain points are and what prevents them from going to the mountains more frequently. We listened closely for areas that we could potentially help by providing some kind of product or service.
Some observations in our interviews this week: - Safety is a big concern (especially for parents) - Avid skiers don't need much help - they have done enough research and planning that they have figured out all of the efficiencies. - Beginners don't need much help shuttling their stuff around because they don't have equipment. They need help with a more efficient rental process. We also need to be very conscious of potentially leading people to the conclusion we're looking for. A few people we've interviewed haven't really seemed to think there are any logistics issues they need help with. Instead of asking them "What logistics issues do you face?" we're going to focus more on getting them to tell us stories about their days on the mountain. We might be able to pick out potential areas of improvement by listening to these stories. This week, we focused on conducting initial interviews to help us through the diverge/converge process, as well as research to help us understand our target markets better. Interviews We spoke to 8 individuals: 2 Avid Skiers, 2 Sometimes Skiers, and 4 Hardly-Ever Skiers. While many mentioned travel and gear logistics as ski trip pain points, validating some of our initial hypotheses, we also gained some interesting learnings about problems we hadn't yet thought of solving. Of note:
Stories In Our individual Stories In submissions sought to synthesize our interview learnings with some of the customer segments we've identified. For example:
We identified a desire to improve the feelings associated with skiing; to make people/resorts/skis happier as opposed to just trying to improve logistics. As a group, we decided that we will turn our focus to the "Sometimes Skier" customer segment in our next set of interviews to really identify what problems we might solve for them. |
AuthorThe Orca team is a group of second year Haas MBAs dedicated to bringing fun back to the logistics of group travel Archives
November 2016
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