Case Study: The V&A Academy’s Opportunity Solution Tree
How the iconic museum’s learning team is undergoing a transformation to become learner-centric and more empowered.
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“We weren’t thinking like product people until relatively recently. We were thinking in this very legacy, museum-like mode,” says Ian Ellard, Head of the V&A Academy. “But now my team - without me badgering them - are doing learner interviews, sharing insights between themselves and pushing to do something about them. Because once you’ve found an interesting insight, you don't wanna keep it to yourself.”
Ian is talking about the “quiet transformation” his team of producers and production managers is currently undergoing at the V&A Academy, the learning offer from one of London’s most recognisable museums, The Victoria and Albert Museum. The team have embraced techniques like Jobs To Be Done interviewing and, more recently, Teresa Torres’ Opportunity Solution Tree.
These are tools more commonly found in a technology startup than a museum whose foundation stone was laid in 1899 by Queen Victoria. But they are helping them understand who their learners are, why they are motivated to learn and what they can do to improve the learning experience and through that, grow their audience.
They are tools that are empowering the team to transform the way they work.
The world before and after Covid
The V&A has a mixed funding model. Fifty percent comes from central government funding, enabling it to be free to visit. The other half needs to be self-generated income from activities like tickets to special exhibitions, image licensing, membership and retail. The V&A Academy is one of these revenue generating activities.
Before Covid forced the museum to close its doors, doing a course was very much an in-person activity. “These were expert-led lectures that took place entirely at the museum in South Kensington,” says Ian. “Sometimes in the garden. It’s one of the loveliest spots in London during summer.”
Then in 2020, they dramatically had to pivot to provide courses online, delivering much of the experience via Microsoft Teams. “We went from a world of physical rooms that moved very slowly to the ever changing world of software,” says Ian, also reflecting on the constraint of, like many established organisations, having to rely on a centralised IT function.
During the pandemic they saw a boom in demand. Then, as the world returned to normal, growth slowed. Despite high NPS scores, they weren’t seeing referrals and organic growth.
The team was frustrated. And naturally being very creative, had lots of ideas about how to respond. “We had created quite a flat environment, but we didn't have any structure for capturing the ideas that the team were having and prioritising them. So what happened was the loudest voices got heard.”
Ian realised they needed a different approach. They also needed to understand in this new world, who their core audience were and why they were motivated to learn with the V&A.
Learner interviews
After being introduced to the idea of Jobs To Be Done, a customer interview technique designed to uncover what outcome users are trying to achieve and their motivations in particular situations, Ian set his 14-strong team a challenge.
“My whole team is tasked with conducting a learner interview at least every two weeks. Which from senior producers down to administrators produces a lot of insight,” he says. These interviews helped the team understand that they have two primary audiences.
The first are recent retirees looking to “build a week”. They are looking to fill the social gap that used to be occupied by work. “The way they might select a course was by looking at everything that takes place on a Tuesday. Because, they do Pilates on Monday. They do a course on Tuesdays. They look after their grandkids on Wednesday… They are creating their social schedule,” he explains.
The second group were pursuing a personal research project. “Our learners do not want an MA. They're not actually motivated by a certificate or anything like that. They are often working on a very personal piece of research.” He gives an example of a woman who is interested in Victorian children’s wear, who had decided to do a Byzantine art course because she wanted to understand the design of a trim on some children’s pyjamas she’d seen. “It's a very particular kind of motivation. This is not vocational in any way.”
Ian says this insight about the two different audiences helped them see that they could serve both groups better. “Our current offer wasn't a super social online experience. And it wasn't super informational either,” he reflects. “So we were perhaps overcharging our informational learners because they weren't that fussed about the social side of things. And we were under socialised for the other group.”
One of the first things they did in response was launch video-on-demand courses for the information-focused learners. Armed with this more sophisticated understanding of who was learning and why, the team have continued to interview and dig deeper.
As they conduct interviews, the team completes a Microsoft Form. “It reposts the results into a channel on Teams so that everybody sees every new learner interview that's coming through,” he explains.
The team member picks a memorable quote, to anchor the key insights coming from the interview. “A verbatim quote from a learner describing a need, a desire, a pain point that they're experiencing in the product,” outlines Ian.
The next challenge was how to organise and respond to this new growing treasure trove of information.
The Opportunity Solution Tree
The Opportunity Solution Tree is a tool developed by Teresa Torres, known for her work on product discovery, that helps teams visualise what they are working on, when and why.
At the top of the tree is the business outcome you’re aiming for. “That in itself was very difficult and took us a long time,” says Ian. “I’ve learned through the process that I, as head of department, should have been much more directive about determining that business objective and setting it early on. I tried to make that part of the collaborative process and that failed miserably the first time around.”
After the false start, the team’s North Star now is to increase learner retention.
Next, the insights from the learner interviews are organised into Opportunities - learner needs or pain points. These create branches, or “swim lanes” where the team decides to focus.
This activity happens at a six-weekly meeting with the full team. “We call it the Mangrove meeting because one of the team observed that the Opportunity Solution Tree looked more like roots than branches,” he smiles. At the meeting, the team shares new insights they’ve discovered.
“We then choose one of the branches to focus on,” explains Ian. “Within the swim lane, we assign small sub-teams a specific story to tackle. And then we go through the next stage, which is to explore solutions. Then, for a specific idea, we consider the most risky assumptions we’re making about that solution, and how you might quickly test them.”
He gives an example, focusing on the group that were under-socialised. After an in-person lecture, they ran a quick survey.
“People aren’t going to complete an online survey at that moment. They want to go to the loo and get to the cafe,” he reckons. “So instead, we held up an iPad with a question asking ‘We’re thinking about hosting an informal social session. Would that interest you?’ And we had green and green and red buttons that people could tap on the way out. And we got a very clear answer ‘yes’ to that.”
So they put the event on. “We put teas and coffees out. You come along and meet your fellow learners. It was really lovely. It didn’t cost us much and it’s improved the learner experience. And it was a mini project for one of our mini teams, assigned during the regular meeting.”
Empowering the team
Once he’d overcome the initial resistance from a team where many have been with the institution for a long time - “they just didn't believe me at first how easy it is to get your customers to talk to you!” - the team has now fully embraced the approach.
“They are getting surprising insights from their learner interviews, and so they are conducting more of them. And they're testing new propositions with live learners,” he says with obvious pride.
As well as creating a clear focus on learners and how to retain them, he believes that the new approach is empowering for the team.
“They can surface an insight, put it on the tree where everybody can see it, and it can be picked up during one of the six weekly meetings and quickly tested. The quiet voices are now being heard. I think they’ve found it super empowering,” he says.
Takeaways
Ian is keen to encourage others in traditional institutions to experiment with tools like Jobs To Be Done and The Opportunity Solution Tree as he believes they are a practical tool to help transform the way you work.
“Tools like this are originally designed to work in a ‘product trio’ context where you've got an engineer, a designer, and a product manager,” he says. “But we’ve found that it can work equally well in a very different organisational context, with a mid-sized team with a flat organisational structure in a very traditional environment.”
The tools encourage a focus on user needs but also help teams to share, discuss and prioritise what to do about the insights. And try things out quickly in a context where this is often hard.
“We’re at the beginning of a really exciting journey as we ‘productify’ what we do,” he says. “It’s a lot of fun!”
Disclosure: I ran a workshop with Ian and his team on the Opportunity Solution Tree and Ian took part in my fellowship programme. If you’re undergoing a similar transformation journey, drop me a line.