PI-24.1: Complete MVP

PART 1

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

MVP JTBD: As a Curriculum Director/Provost/Institutional leader, I want to understand what occupations my portfolio of offerings prepares learners to do, and how my institution can quickly adapt our offerings to align with promising market opportunities (occupations) in my area. 

Value to Customers, Users, and Lightcast

Customers: The Skillabi-in-Analyst MVP will help institutions develop and strengthen academic programs to align with skills needed for promising career opportunities in their area, ensuring programs are valuable to employers and helping learners gain the skills needed for career success. The product will:

• Be tailored to this priority use case, so that users clearly understand and resonate with the benefit of the tool, and understand the steps to take in the product.

• Offer a more seamless process for users who have Analyst access, without requiring users to engage in multiple standalone processes and switch between platforms to connect career and education insights.

• Enable high accessibility to program skills and market alignment insights for institutions who have not been equipped to dedicate significant resources in extracting course-level skills with the current standalone Skillabi.

• Allow users to get to insights more quickly than in the previous version of Skillabi, without reliance on collection of extensive syllabi docs, Lightcast implementation of course content, and faculty review/validation.

Lightcast:

• Increased Reach and Revenue: Due to its increased accessibility for institutions and focused use case, Skillabi 2.0 will allow Lightcast to reach a greater number of institutions who currently struggle to address the core problem that this product solves. We anticipate the following revenue projections from renewals of current Skillabi + new sales from a planned Q1 launch of Skillabi-in-Analyst (see revenue estimate calculations):

  • Projected Skillabi-in-Analyst cumulative new sales by EOY 2024 =  ~$500k (ranging from $250k worst case - $1M best case) 

  • Projected Skillabi cumulative renewals by EOY 2024 = $535k (ranging from $353k worst cast - $704k best case)

    • Oct 2023 ARR for Skillabi is $1.3M

  • Projected Cumulative Total Income from Current & New Skillabi by EOY 2024: $1.035M (ranging from $603k- $1.704M) 

• Encourage cross-selling by connecting more closely with Analyst (and Alumni Pathways) users.

• Integrate more closely with Analyst product, taking steps towards modularizing Analyst for EDU products

• Remove reliance on maintaining highly resource intensive processes with a standalone product (Skillabi). Requirements are intensive to… 

  • Buyers/customers, to provide curricular materials and vet the quality of skill tagging

  • Lightcast-internal product data operations teams, to process, skills tag, and set up relationships between curricular materials

  • Lightcast-internal engineering teams, to support multiple software platforms and technology stacks

• Build faster and with reduced resources by leveraging existing Analyst capabilities and data connections for new features as applicable.

Success Criteria & Metrics

Definition of Done, PI-24.1: Complete Skillabi-in-Analyst MVP, enabling our team to sell to prospects and for customers to begin piloting the product beginning in Feb 2024. Includes complete Program List page, Market Opportunities page, Program Detail page.

DoD issues for engineering, ranked in order of priority/urgency (see Figma mockup for details)

1. Program Detail: Target occupations (jira)

2. Create & edit program page (jira)

3. Application selector in the vertical (jira)

4. Favorite occupations + Flag programs (jira) 

5. Advanced alignment score settings (jira inputs and permissions)

6. College/Department Filter (jira Curricular Skills API and Analyst slice)

Success metrics 

Upon MVP release at end of PI:

• Product is ready to pilot with the institutions that have agreed to participate in 2-month pilot in Feb 2024. Product functionality available for pilots includes items stated in pilot agreement.

  • Potential pilot prospects include:

    1. University of Manitoba (current Skillabi customer; pilot included in Skillabi price)

    2. Austin Peay State University (current Skillabi customer; pilot included)

    3. Fleming College (TBC; $8k contract for pilot)

    4. Austin Community College (TBC; $10k contract for pilot)

    5. St Catherine University (TBC; $5k contract for pilot)

• Refined engagement metrics to monitor success of soft launch and functionality to track engagement.

  • Types of metrics/feedback we will track include:

    1. Engagement with aspects of the tool (e.g., page views, weekly active users or accounts, repeat usage, use cases and workflows [qualitative])

    2. Satisfaction (e.g., Net Promoter Score, level of effectiveness at supporting users in accomplishing goals, impact for user on [time saved, prioritization decisions made, etc])

    3. Functionality pain points & delighters (e.g., ease of navigation, confidence in knowing how to use the tool, challenging features, most loved features, functionality wish list, functionality deal breakers)

  • We anticipate using the following engagement tracking approaches and tools to capture metrics: 

    1. Pendo, to monitor page views, interactions in the platform, level of engagement, usage patterns and trends, etc.

    2. PlaybookUX, to asynchronously capture feedback by recording the user’s interactions in the tool and their live reactions while using.

    3. Qualitative feedback collected via 1-1 conversations with users periodically throughout pilot period, and potential group conversations

    4. Survey via Google Forms or similar to supplement interview/meeting feedback with quantitative data 

  • This period will be used to inform the level of success of the product in the current MVP state, and where changes are needed to the product before rolling out via full launch. Product success at this stage would mean…

    1. High Adoption: Pilot institutions use all primary features of this software. Upon completion of the pilot, they choose to purchase an annual license of the product.

    2. High Retention: pilot institutions using the software on a regular cadence throughout the pilot, indicating that they will find continual value and are therefore likely to renew.

    3. High Satisfaction & Impact: pilot institutions express the value of the software and the positive impact it has had - or that they expect it will have - on their ability to accomplish central goals.

• Refined go-to-market plan and supporting materials, including: messaging, value proposition, and pitch for sales & marketing to source new customers.

Aspects that are out of scope 

This is contained to initial MVP of product. Over time, we will build upon this tool to work towards our Long-Term Product JTBD:

Leadership and program owners face difficulty identifying how they can optimize their program mix to offer what’s needed in the labor market, strengthen the skills in their existing programs, and communicate compelling recommendations to stakeholders highlighting the impact of program revision and development recommendations.

As an institution purchasing this capability, I have reservations about the level of effort,  corresponding timeline, and complexity that I perceive is required with the current Skillabi solution. My institution (likely) already has users on the Analyst platform and would have fewer reservations about a “lightweight” approach to curriculum alignment accessible via the Analyst platform. 

PART 2  

Early UX (wireframes or mockups)

Figma - MVP

Non-Functional Attributes & Usage Projections

n/a

Dependencies

Legal and Ethical Considerations

No legal or ethical concerns.

High-Level Rollout Strategies

• Go-to market plan in development [see details]

Risks

• Two issues within this epic diverge from the typical “Analyst paradigm”: the Edit Program page, and embedding the module link in the vertical. Due to the unique nature of these issues, there is potential for difficulty finding an approach to tackling each and addressing concerns within the time period.

• Sequencing will be important, as two issues are dependent in-progress updates to the Curricular Skills API which are expected to be completed by our previous Skillabi team leaders (Caleb Bray) but not formally included as part of their PI processes.

Open Questions