This Accelerator was struggling with operational inefficiency.
In the fast-paced world of startup acceleration, every minute counts. Yet, this Accelerator found itself bothered by inefficient processes and disconnected systems. Their team was spending countless hours juggling between various tools, manually inputting data, and searching for information scattered across Affinity, Google Drive, and others.
This work was done through Optemization.
The challenge: a digital maze.
Imagine a dedicated team, passionate about nurturing local startups, yet trapped in a maze of spreadsheets, emails, and outdated software. They relied on Affinity as their CRM, but it lacked the flexibility to meet their unique needs. Their Qualtrics forms generated data in formats that were difficult to manage. The widespread use of Google Sheets for various tasks resulted in disconnected and hard-to-find data.
Enter the Optemization team.
Optemization was brought on board to untangle this digital knot and streamline their operations. We dove deep into their processes, conducting contextual inquiry interviews, analyzing workflows, and identifying pain points. As digital operations experts, we then looked for possible solutions. I facilitated and analyzed all of the research myself.
From planning to reporting.
First of all, I created a Research Plan with the questions we would like to answer, a description of our methods and the input we required from the Accelerator. After this was approved, I moved on to scheduling and conducting the Contextual Inquiry interviews via Zoom and analyzing them on Dovetail for recurring themes. Last but not least, I gathered the insights into a Research Sprint Report, alongside my recommendations based on the study's findings.
Streamlining their path: a way out of the digital maze.
The proposed changes meant to revolutionize the Accelerator's operations. No more endless searching for information or manual data entry. Instead, a seamless flow of data between systems, automated workflows, and a Single Source of Truth for all their needs.
To better illustrate these changes, I included a few visual and interactive embeds in the final report:
- product demos built with Arcade,
- videos,
- Information Architecture diagram built on Figjam.
© 2024 Luiza Cantini