Discovery

Understanding the needs of entrepreneurs and gaining investment

Problem

How do we digitise an existing paper service for entrepreneurs to gain start-up funding from the UK Government? How can we make it easier for entrepreneurs to apply for funding and help them gain access to start-up grants?

My Approach

Meeting stakeholders and service users, During discovery phase I met with our sponsoring stakeholders and in a workshop scenario I mapped out their expectations, assumptions, requirements and what their version of success looked like. I also met with the team that made decisions on the entrepreneurs current paper applications. I met with entrepreneurs who had recently gone through the paper application service to get their feedback and how they’d found the process. I also met with entrepreneurs who were about to start the paper application and understand their initial expectations.

Collating findings and updates, Over the weeks of these various workshops and interviews I added the findings to a discovery wall of post-its back at the product team’s office and I hosted weekly updates with the team of what I’d heard from people that week. We’d discuss weekly findings and start to generate themes coming out of the discovery research.

Understanding what’s important and what to focus on, During the final phases of discovery, from the mass of information that had been gained I presented the key themes coming out through the research. This included areas where the new digital service could improve on the current paper service, problems entrepreneurs encountered and problems the admin team had when making decisions because they needed more information from entrepreneurs.

Outcome

• An understanding of expectations from key stakeholders.

• Understanding of entrepreneurs, their initial expectations of the service and the challenges they encountered using the existing paper service e.g. jargon, not knowing what information or documents they needed before they began. Needing information from their accountant. The preference for updates on their application status.

• Understanding what information the team making decisions on the application actually need and use to make a decision on an founder’s application.

• A refined list of essential information the service needed from entrepreneurs to support their grant application.

• The core ingredients to start generating ideas on a digital service for entrepreneurs to gain funding.

• An understanding of constraints and other processes happening e.g. the admin team were upgrading their IT systems, so how might the proposed digital service work seamlessly with a new IT system?