Understanding Users Leads to Innovation

Guest post by Sara Lawrence, Product Development Brand Manager,
Saint Mary's Press

Back in December, John asked me to lead new–to–the–world innovations at Saint Mary’s Press. At the time, I was pretty comfortable in my role as marketing associate, dabbling in a number of different areas. But the more I discerned the idea, the more I was feeling called to move into this new role.  So, not quite knowing what it all meant, I said yes! I officially moved into this new role in March and have been forging a path ever since.

So, what better way to dive in than to hold an Innovation Kick-Off retreat! I knew the most important piece to innovating was going to be the voice of the customer. How could we possibly come up with innovative ideas and not put our customers at the center of it. So, for the purposes of the retreat, we focused on parish customers.

I dove into the huge well of site visit data we had on parish customers and found some major trends. From there, I created a problem statement that encompassed the struggles our customers are facing and the goals they are trying to achieve. This statement was the most important piece of the retreat – this statement would be thing we would go back to throughout our two days together to gut check our ideas.

The 9 of us (8 SMP employees + an innovator from NC) converged on the Science Museum in St. Paul for our two day brainstorm session. We were armed with tools essential for brainstorming: crayons, toys, pipe cleaners and other thingamajigs to keep our hands busy and our minds creative! I don’t think any of us could have anticipated the amount of ideas that would come flowing out! There weren’t many rules those two days, but the number one rule was “NO SHOOTING DOWN IDEAS.” It may have been the best rule ever invented, our ideas flowed easily, we built on each other’s ideas and made huge lists of possibilities. 

Half way through our time together, it came time to evaluate our ideas. We kept our problem statement and our customer tasks at hand and slowly narrowed the list down to 8 things we wanted to prototype later that day. We split into groups of two and each took an idea – we had 30 minutes to create our idea out of random craft materials and had to present it to the larger group. Later that afternoon we did the same thing with the other 4 ideas.

This photo sums up the craziness of our two days together.

All in all the two days was a huge success, we have some great ideas that we’ll be able to quickly prototype and test, and move forward with if successful. I feel like we were able to really get the most out of our two days together because everything we did was steeped in customer research and data.

If you want to see our first product idea, head to the commons with your smart phone, if you don’t have a smart phone, borrow one from a friend! All you need is a QR code reader – on the windows near Mindy/Carol there are QR codes – check them out and let me know what you think!

Also – if you ever have any innovative ideas, feel free to send them my way. I’m keeping a list and we’ll continue to review it and add to it! I’m sure I’ll be calling on a number of you in the next few months to help with different innovation brainstorms, prototypes, tests, etc.! This is a really exciting time for Saint Mary’s Press – our customers are at the heart of innovation!

Thank you to those that joined me on the retreat and helped come up with some amazing ideas and thank you to all those who’ve gone on site visits.  The data we're collecting is worth more than we can imagine – the little gems of information from each visit lines up with other visits and innovation is formed!