PART 1

Customer/User Job-to-be-Done or Problem

The Scope of the user problem should be narrowed to the scope you are planning to solve in this phase of work. There may be other aspects you are aware of and plan to solve in the future. For now, put those in the Out of Scope section.

We are open sourcing the Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy (LOT) Explore Taxonomy endpoint, “Open Occupations”, for the public to use our occupation language. This is the next evolution of driving adoption of a global standard language for work and skills. The offering will be the same as Open Skills and Open Titles, you can download/explore the taxonomy for free, give a trial of normalizations (limit of 50), but restrict the Mappings and Classify endpoints. A user's Open Skills/Titles credentials and security tokens will be the same for Open Occupations.

Value to Customers & Users

In the JTBD framework, these are the “pains” and “gains” your solution will address. Other ways to think about it: What’s the rationale for doing this work? Why is it a high priority problem for your customers and how will our solution add value?

• LOT is our new global standard and open sourcing it will make that standard more appealing to global prospects and partners.

• Opening up our proprietary occupation taxonomy would be the natural extension of our already open Lightcast Titles and would provide a valuable standard for users to adopt and the Lightcast standardization ecosystem becomes further embedded in their systems and workflows. Open Titles have been very valuable to our customers and partners but there is a need to naturally group those titles into a more manageable taxonomy that is not as granular as 75k+ titles and close the language gap for more applicability across use cases. We chose to open source the skills taxonomy for similar reasons. 

• LOT provides significantly more granularity than federal or national taxonomies while maintaining a level of aggregation that allows robust analysis and is the foundation for accessing our Career Pathways Model, Similarity Model, and our Defining-Distinguishing-Necessary Skills Model. These models are natural extensions upon which we can monetize an open LOT taxonomy. Opening would drive adoption of our standard occupation language while also driving an increased need for additional paid services and products. 

• Open sourcing allows us to respond to the market because we accept suggestions and apply them quickly compared to  SOC/O*Net which has a long process to accept new 'occupations'. We evaluate and beat such timelines significantly.

• If executed strategically, the launch and corresponding promotional content, will drive additional interest in the Lightcast brand, our data, and our solutions. That interest will convert into real opportunities for the entire business for quarters and years to come. 

Value to Lightcast

Sometimes we do things for our own benefit. List those reasons here. 

Enhance the value of our open data standards and the promotional and marketing opportunities to drive more adoption into our data enrichments and increase revenue opportunities.

Target User Role/Client/Client Category

Who are we building this for?

All prospects, partners, customers, across all BUs.

Delivery Mechanism

How will users receive the value?

Classification Functionality - 50 queries per month:

Classification API - classifications/{release}/lot/classify

Taxonomy Exploration - unlimited access:

Classification API - taxonomies/lot/versions/{version}

Mapping Functionality (must have access to both to/from sides of the mappings) - Titles and LOT:

Classification API - mappings/

Success Criteria & Metrics

How will you know you’ve completed the epic? How will you know if you’ve successfully addressed this problem? What usage goals do you have for these new features? How will you measure them?

Classification LOT explore taxonomy endpoint opened up, restricted claim to normalization endpoint, credential assignment/alignment with Open Skills/Titles.

Users sign up and download the LOT. Track volume of sign-ups and endpoint hits.

Aspects that are out of scope (of this phase)

What is explicitly not a part of this epic? List things that have been discussed but will not be included. Things you imagine in a phase 2, etc.

User interface builds are out of scope.

PART 2

Solution Description

Early UX (wireframes or mockups)

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Non-Functional Attributes & Usage Projections

Consider performance characteristics, privacy/security implications, localization requirements, mobile requirements, accessibility requirements

Dependencies

Is there any work that must precede this? Feature work? Ops work? 

• Micro has work to prepare Kong for migrating Classification API to Kong

• Classification API will move towards new Lightcast branded URL

Legal and Ethical Considerations

Just answer yes or no.

High-Level Rollout Strategies

• Initial rollout to [internal employees|sales demos|1-2 specific beta customers|all customers]

  • If specific beta customers, will it be for a specific survey launch date or report availability date 

• How will this guide the rollout of individual stories in the epic?

• The rollout strategy should be discussed with CS, Marketing, and Sales.

• How long we would tolerate having a “partial rollout” -- rolled out to some customers but not all

Test signup process, API endpoints, and if all works we will coordinate with Marketing, Comms, Legal, and BUs to rollout and educate internal teams and promote externally.

Risks

Focus on risks unique to this feature, not overall delivery/execution risks. 

Open sourcing any metadata or endpoint that we do not intend to expose.

Open Questions

What are you still looking to resolve?

Complete with Engineering Teams

Estimated Costs

Direct Financial Costs

Are there direct costs that this feature entails? Dataset acquisition, server purchasing, software licenses, etc.?

Team Effort

Each team involved should give a general t-shirt size estimate of their work involved. As the epic proceeds, they can add a link to the Jira epic/issue associated with their portion of this work.