LEADERSHIP AND STRATEGY
Strategic Decision Making
Identifying and choosing the best long-term actions that align with an organization’s goals by weighing complex factors to guide overall direction and ensure sustainable success.
The Challenge
Develop a plan to serve the non-degree credential quality signal as one or more product. It should be effectively served to support a wide and divergent marketplace of learners, educators, employers and their intermediaries.
Users / Audiences
Our plan needed to be well received by our partner organization and our funder. Additionally, we wanted it to validate favorably with internal subject matter experts (SMEs).
Scope and Constraints
Our research to date involved our primary audience—educators, employers, and their intermediaries—so our plan needed to incorporate what we know now and be adaptable to fit our broader market base as we learn more.
Organizations
EQOS, JFFLabs, Burning Glass Institute (BGI), Gitlab (funder)
My Role
UX Design Lead, Product Manger
Date / Duration
Jun 2023 – Aug 2024
The Process
I developed a learner-to-worker journey/service map.
I reviewed the research we had gathered and leveraged it along with desktop research to develop a combined journey/service map to outline the learner-to-worker phases including the support touch-point of educators, employers, and their intermediaries. This helped me to understand perspectives, methods and tools across the audience landscape.
I crafted a plan to balance organizational goals and audience needs.
Part of working for a social impact organization like JFF was to publicly broadcast project work to support the organization's mission and future work. However, we determined the power brokers in the audience for the EQOS quality signal would want that signal served the easiest way, which would be embedded in the secure hiring tools they already use. Our solution needed to serve both needs.
I refined the plan with my team and validated it with internal SMEs.
I proposed a two-part solution to carry the quality signal: A secure API and a public-facing web app. The web app could serve the broadest audience to teach, inform, and advocate for non-degree credentials through the quality signal rating system. The API could be embedded directly in tools hiring teams already use to empower hiring teams to confidently evaluate candidates with alternative qualifications alongside those with traditional degrees.
Outcomes and Learning
My plan was approved for the project.
The broader team and funder overwhelming approved the plan I laid out and my team fleshed our approach in our product roadmap and backlog epics.
We built prototypes and validated them with our early adopters group.
Both initial prototypes of the API and the web app were well received along with feedback to help us refine our approach going forward.
