Innovation Insight: Getting clear on your end-user

Part 2 of the behind-the-scenes story of the FHL's first Power Play – a three-month social innovation sprint to increase female leadership in hockey.

Halfway through the second sprint session, the sprint team reached a critical decision point – which end user were they designing for? They had been working under the assumption that they were creating a solution for female coaches. But what if they were wrong?

Choosing the end user you're designing for is probably the second most important and difficult part of the innovation process – and is directly connected to figuring out which problem to solve. (See the first sprint story.)

The ultimate goal of this FHL Power Play sprint is to come up with one idea that the team could build out as a minimum viable product (MVP) – something very bare-bones that they could test out cheaply and quickly.

"We don't have to put something out there that is perfect, that we've spent tons of money creating. If we do that, we're likely going to spend a lot of resources upfront and then have to find more funding to fix the mistakes that we made."

One powerful way to generate those ideas is to create what are called user stories. These are essentially one-sentence headlines that identify something your end user would like to be able to do but can't currently. For example, if your end users are busy dog owners, one user story might be that they want a way to exercise their dogs without having to go outside.

Once you produce a lot of user stories, you create a shortlist and pick one to test in your MVP.

So the Power Play team opened up a Google Jamboard and started capturing user stories about what female coaches might want to improve their coaching experience, based on the team's research, and the diversity of their expertise and lived experience both inside and outside hockey. But they quickly realized that they still had some critical decisions to make if they really wanted to narrow down their idea to something transformative.

It turns out that the coaching ecosystem includes a lot of potential end users beyond coaches – players, hockey organizations, coach trainers, parents – and the team wasn't sure which one they wanted to focus on.

"There is a whole slew of women out there who don't know they want to be coaches yet because they've never had female role modelsl to see that they could be that. So if the end user is a hockey organization, I could say that I want to solicit female coaches to increase my number of females coaching. Or I as a parent want more female coaches on the bench so that my kids can have the benefit of a variety of coaching styles and different skill sets."?

Despite this insight, most of the ideas the team generated during the sprint addressed the needs of female coaches already in the system. But this focus raises another (yet unspoken) issue.

It makes women (the female coaches) responsible for fixing a problem they didn't cause in the first place – something we see often in equity initiatives.

The hidden message here implies that women need to try harder, be stronger, and be braver to succeed as hockey coaches. All while continuing to do the majority of invisible unpaid work in society. And that's definitely not something the Power Play team wants.

With time running out in their session, the team agreed to defer the decision on which user to focus on and continue collecting user stories on the Jamboard until their next online meeting – when an outside innovation expert would help them evaluate their ideas to date.

From there, they'll be off to their three-day face-to-face Power Play session in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the bulk of the sprint design work will happen. Which leaves them just 10 days to make some big decisions to guide the future of this critical intervention!

Follow along to be the first to hear about their next big idea and how they plan to bring it to life.

"Nothing about us, without us."