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In France, a public platform allows training organizations to publish their training offers that provide certifications recognized by the State. The problem is that this public platform is not very user-friendly for entering training offers,

and training organizations sometimes have many offers. Moreover, they struggle to format (HTML tags) their offer content (which can deter learners who want to sign up). The State platform offers a 'XML Transfer' service to import training offers in one go, but training organizations lack the skills to format their offers in XML. Training organizations are thus missing out on training sales because their catalog is far from optimal on the public platform. Competitive analysis: the other solutions have been around for at least 1 or 2 years. They offer: o This major feature 'XML Transfer' among others (ERP for training organizations). In this case, formatting is not offered. The data model of the training offers is different from that of the public platform (the public platform is not necessarily intuitive) o Only this major feature: often the price is high. Also, the import is performed with difficulty (the user journey focuses on the export in XML format and the other steps of the 'customer job' are omitted).

1. Business Context

MonCatalogueFormations

B2B

For training organizations that want to increase their training sales on a public platform, MonCatalogueFormations is a training catalog management product that allows users to import, modify, format, and export their catalog to the public platform.

We started by creating the business model canvas for our future business. We then broke down the work of the training organization into functional (non-emotional) jobs to be done and developed the value proposition map (we listed the 

the pains and gains of the customers at each step of the customer job). Here is an excerpt from our customer Job :

Job Executor
Type of step
Step
Page
Training Organization
1. Define
Plans to import a large number of training courses onto the public platform
Training Organization
2. Locate
Designs their training catalog
Training Organization
3. Prepare
Prepares the Excel import file or the training courses in the application
Training Organization
4. Confirm
Previews the import of their training courses
Training Organization
5. Execute
Imports their training catalog
Training Organization
6. Monitor
Checks the appearance of their catalog
Training Organization
7. Modify
Refines the training catalog and its appearance
Training Organization
8. Conclude
Exports the public platform XML file in the correct format

A few pages are mapped here with the job steps (others are deliberately hidden).

The Product Owner mapped the Jobs to be Done to the major features that were prioritized and then broken down into features for estimation (the features are not set in stone at this point).
After the estimation, the Product Owner defined the business terms: this is our glossary that allows us to delineate the bounded contexts as well as the 'business domain'. The team was able to carry out domain modeling, and we designed the domain with the help of the Product Owner's pre-digestion and the business processes (event storming). At the same time, the target users and personas were defined. The Product Owner (who plays several roles in our project) wrote the conversations between future users and our system. This naturally determined the task flows (sequence of pages). Once the pages were ordered and refined, they had to be prototyped. It is at this point that the Product Owner attaches the business actions (defined in part during domain modeling) to the pages. The jobs to be done, conversations & entities are also linked to the pages. At the same time, the use cases (for product testing), functional requirements (which are subsets of the features), and business rules are specified. The developers were able to take over by validating the domain that was defined and configuring (front/back end) the product.

2. How did we proceed ?

We gained several benefits from this first product set up on Synthia :

  • Training organizations save a significant amount of time entering the catalog (for a catalog of 100 training offers, we import it in 25 minutes rather than 800 minutes of manual entry on the public platform). Moreover, training organizations can simulate the appearance of their catalog and reduce their verification time for formatting.

  • Training organizations are able to format their catalog for a large number of training courses (formatting is done on our interface in a few minutes for 100 training offers, whereas competitors cannot offer the same service).

  • Training organizations can check their catalog at any time and modify the data in a few clicks (if an error appeared on a hundred training offers, some were able to pay XML consultants thousands of euros). Our UX method and our data model allow this.

  • Some of our clients have been able to increase their monthly revenue by 500%.

Regarding performance for end customers :

  • We keep documentation on the business and the product​

  • We ensured that we were building a relevant solution to the defined problem

  • We improved collaboration between the business team and the development team through the borrowed methods

  • The user experience is satisfactory (according to initial feedback and the time between importing and exporting the catalog)

  • We likely saved time on software construction by transferring part of the developers' workload to the business/product team and optimizing specifications

  • We were able to easily frame the profiles of juniors, whether on the product side or developers

3. Our assessment and performance

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