Re-use Analyst Features and Reports to Add Value to Alumni Pathways

PART 1

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

As a User of Alumni Pathways I want a more fully featured tool so I can better understand the outcomes of my Alumni. 

As a user of Alumni Pathways who is less data savvy than our typical Analyst audience, I want to be able to answer my Alumni Outcomes questions in the platform without feeling confused, or needing additional training support.

Additionally, because of the dominant role the data pipeline plays in delivering Alumni Pathways features, even some small software improvements require multiple engineering teams across the pipeline to collaborate and coordinate on the optimal approach for delivery.

Value to Customers & Users

Adding features and reports to Alumni Pathways that are relevant to the work they are doing will allow users to better understand and gain additional insights into the outcome of their alumni.

The cross-team improvements covered by this epic are typically either requested by customers and/or surfaced through product research with customers. Specific benefits to customers and users are included on each issue.

Value to Lightcast

Adding additional value that has been previously validated, scoped, and implemented in the Analyst platform will allow us to quickly flesh out Alumni Pathways and add value to current and prospective customers. This additional value should help with both new sale opportunities and also increase the likelihood of renewals.

The value added to customers (and buyers) of these features will increase retention (e.g. by removing friction or adding value in the software), support new sales (e.g. through improving demos of the software), and/or reduce costs (e.g. by reducing the burden on data delivery and/or success teams). Specific benefits to Lightcast are included on each issue.

Target User Role/Client/Client Category

Target external users: Institutional Research, Academic Leadership / President’s Office, Enrollment Marketing, and Advancement/Alumni Relations/Foundations teams across all current Edu segments.

Target internal users: Lightcast Sales, Marketing, Success, and Engineering teams

Delivery Mechanism

Alumni Pathways platform.

Success Criteria & Metrics

There are a number of different features and full reports that will potentially be pulled over to Alumni Pathways from Analyst. Instead of trying to specify usage for each feature the usage goal will be to have equivalent usage and adoption in Alumni Pathways as in Analyst based on % of total users vs users engaging with the feature.

Definition of Done: Jira issues completed.

Success Criteria: Are noted on each issue.

North Star Metric

Alumni Pathway’s current North Star Metric is Filtered Reports per Month by Account (as a proxy for answering institutional users' questions and supporting their work). We believe that each feature we complete will improve this metric, and will be monitoring progress over time.

Aspects that are out of scope (of this phase)

For UI/UX features and improvements, we will not be pursing those that do not exist in Analyst today or features that exist in Analyst but would take significant effort/LOE to move to Alumni Pathways.

For Corss-Team work, Anything that isn’t an issue on one of the epics linked by engineering teams.

PART 2

Solution Description

Designs are attached to each issue as relevant.

Early UX (wireframes or mockups)

Each feature will be identified in the specific Jira issues and will largely look and work just as they do in Analyst today.

Non-Functional Attributes & Usage Projections

Privacy / Security Implications

Any use of National Student Clearinghouse data as part of this epic and/or the ultimate solution will need to comply with our contractual requirements described in a previous epic (https://economicmodeling.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DPM/pages/2488172582).

Localization Requirements

Alumni Pathways is USA-only. Wherever National Student Clearinghouse data is used, development must be restricted to the USA only (due to security requirements in our partnership agreement with the Clearinghouse). Special background checks will be required for development and support teams accessing Clearinghouse data as part of this work.

Other Requirements

We will need to achieve at least the standard/typical performance and privacy/security of all software across the Alumni Pathways product and data pipeline.

Any improvements to Alumni Pathways software specifically will need to meet the mobile and accessibility requirements of the Analyst Platform.

Dependencies

The features we identified as part of this epic have no outside team dependencies. We will have Red Team prioritize the core features for Alumni Pathways first and these features will be worked on when there is bandwidth available beyond what the team can work on for those core features.

Legal and Ethical Considerations

No.

High-Level Rollout Strategies

• Rollout strategy will vary somewhat depending on the different functionality we are porting over but will generally follow a fairly similar approach

  • Before release communicate the feature and benefits to Sales and CS

  • Upon release flag the new feature or report in Pendo

  • Document the update in the Changelog

  • Monitor usage and feedback and iterate as needed

Risks

If we are not careful we run the risk of cannibalizing Analyst sales and renewals. We were careful about identifying features and reports that are not core to Analyst so this is a minimal risk. We also need to make sure that the features we identify to pull over add value to the user and are not just adding “bloat” to Alumni Pathways.

Appropriate safeguards and correct handling of protected information (PII & National Student Clearinghouse)

Open Questions

We need to prioritize the features identified as part of this and also get the work groomed and estimated.

Complete with Engineering Teams

Estimated Costs

Direct Financial Costs

No.

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.