As one45′s Product Manager, I get to speak with a lot of medical education professionals. One thing we all have in common is a focus on continuous improvement.
I often get to hear about how our clients are improving their processes for measuring learning outcomes, but I don’t usually get an opportunity to share how we are working to improve our processes and outcomes here at one45. In this post, I want to share how we recently applied the principles of continuous improvement to develop our new Form Builder.
Feedback: The Key to Continuous Improvement
As medical educators know, giving and receiving regular feedback is the best method to achieve continuous improvement. If you’re good at giving feedback, it means you’re able to pinpoint a behaviour that is contributing to a positive outcome, or a behaviour that can be changed to improve the outcome. If you’re good at receiving feedback, you’re able to internalize the feedback and adjust your behaviour as a result. Feedback at its best is always geared toward future behaviour, so the sooner you receive feedback, the sooner you can modify your behaviour and get the outcome you want.
Our Continuously Improving Process
When we decided to release an updated form builder to our clients, we wanted to find a way to incorporate customer feedback as early in our development process as possible. If we could get feedback from our clients during the development process, rather than after the project wrapped up, we believed we could:
- Avoid building a tool that didn’t address an actual customer need
- Incorporate our customers’ great ideas into the product
- Develop the tools faster by getting answers to our questions and validating our assumptions faster and sooner
- Get to know these customers a bit better, and they’d get to know a bit more about our team
What we did
To test our hypothesis, we invited two of our “Super Administrator” users to join us for our development meetings each week over the course of the project. Each week, we reviewed the work done during the previous week; discussed work to be done in the next week; and had an opportunity to go over any problems, questions, or obstacles related to the project.
The meetings were short (only about a half-hour each) but incredibly productive. Each week as we reviewed the previous week’s work we were able to identify areas for improvement, and use “feedback from the field” to resolve our questions about each feature. I’m most proud of our ability to incorporate some of the suggestions for improving form building productivity that really make the tool shine.
The Result
The positive feedback we’ve received from clients about the Form Builder speaks volumes about how well our team executed this project. We owe a huge amount of thanks to the customers who shared their time with us and gave us their valuable feedback along the way. My favorite piece of feedback came after the project, in the form of an email that said: “It was great to be involved with this project. I would definitely be interested in participating in another feedback session!”