Duarte Strategy Workshop
Case Study: Duarte is a thought-leader and subject matter expert in story-crafting and communications, located in the heart of Silicon Valley. Nancy Duarte reached out with a challenge to create a forward-looking re-imagination of methodologies by which she could create improved and more impactful engagements with her customers, to grow with deeper reach, and leverage their existing content while creating additional value via custom IP. In addition, she sought to create and foster a community among her users, leveraging cutting edge technologies along with improved monetization.
I led an initial two-day onsite workshop with Nancy and my solutions architect. Our goal was to, working with her high-level vision and several previous weeks of immersion and research, dive into each component of her ecosystem with assessments, proposals and dialog about viability and options. We were then able to sketch out a technical roadmap to achieve her goal of launching an enriched user experience and product offerings.
During the workshop, we provided scope and grounding for each component of this new ecosystem, including growth and ROI potential along with implications/challenges and caveats of each component, noting where economies could be found (by leveraging open source/off-the-shelf systems) and partnerships vs custom solutions.
Research was a key component of pre-workshop prep as well as post-workshop follow-up and documentation. Activities included consultation with leading edge AI subject matter experts and open source framework platform providers, combining all gathered intel with business requirements. Applying these insights allowed us to project how Nancy could meet her goals. This engagement was a great success and through continued check-ins, I'm finding Nancy firmly (and aggressively) on the path to a great launch later this year.
My Solutions Architect, Jim Duong, with me at Duarte. I find having a solutions architect as a partner during strategy workshops keeps our session work grounded in reality and feasibility, while we create, ideate and strategize. At a high-level, my method is that we 'tag team' between concept-solution-risk/cost-alternatives-implementation, and by the end of the workshop's second day, the new ecosystem has been roughed out, along with next steps/TBD's, action items assigned. In this case, we identified several open source frameworks to investigate further, several technologies to research and weigh (machine learning/AI platforms), scoped phases, added clarity around feature sets and functionality.
