About this Course

At multiple points in your professional life, a technology tool you are responsible for building will fail. There are a million reasons why these things happen, but failed systems aren’t failures. They are delayed successes. This final course will go through the process to help you digest what went wrong, and how to course correct. We will start with strategies to evaluate where things failed. You need to know how to react when users say everything is broken. The first response is usually frustration. Which while understandable, isn’t productive. You will learn strategies for user engagement and bringing them into the fold for the development process. You will learn how to engage with users. Listening is critical for success but how you show them you are listening is part of the art form. Once you have heard from your users, get them talking to each other. Facilitate a user community to get support for your platform rollout. This will ultimately lead to increased adoption. After you have tried everything, we will show you how to determine if anything is salvageable, and decide how to move forward. That may mean a new Platform. We’ll show you how to get the most out of a bad situation. You’re not starting over, but you are starting again with more information and understanding of your business, your users, and your platform needs. Knowing how to close a failed platform implementation is an important Product Platform Managers skill.

Created by: The University of Maryland, College Park,University System of Maryland

Level: Intermediate