Bringing Digital Products from Ideas to Revenue

The Challenge

Taking Membership engagement concepts into the market

PMI (Project Management Institute) is the premier, global project management association with nearly 500,000 members, and, like many membership associations, they were struggling with how evolve so they could continue to create value for their members.

PMI had identified 4 high-potential new products that had spent too much time in the design phase. With an important board meeting only 2 months away, they needed support moving from a glossy deck to a three-dimensional, market-validated, customer experience.

We partnered with PMI to answer the following questions:

  1. Within our project portfolio, what will our members actually value?
  2. How should these experiences manifest?
  3. What should the pricing model be?
  4. What's after the MVP? How can we scale?
Project Overview

Client

Project Management Institute

Project Type

Corporate Venture Building

Industry

Education

Project Attributes

Digital Product/Service
Experience Design
B2C
Alpha
Subscription

Key Milestones

  • 60-day live Alpha test
  • First revenues
  • Commercial product roadmap
  • Go-to-market strategy
  • Capability-building playbook

2 new commercial products

More than 500,000 total users with 35,000 to 40,000 active monthly users

Internal capability building that spread to other teams

Deeper relationships with strategically important customer segments

The Impact

Two new flagship products in PMI's membership offering

After the initial market testing to determine what to build, we built MVPS for two new offerings during a 3-month-sprint. This allowed us to answer their critical questions quickly and affordably before they invested in a commercial build.

PMI then built these products on-platform, launched them internationally, and they have hundreds of thousands of users while continuing to gain traction.

"You helped our team become more thoughtful, quicker, more nimble, and you helped us really understand the process of bringing digital solutions to the market, which we were able to spread throughout the entire organization. ”

Global Product Manager
How we did it

We proved and improved the new membership model with rapid in-market experimentation

Opportunity Framing

We synthesized multiple decks of foundational research from PMI to reassemble and identify opportunity zones. In a 2-day workshop with the PMI team, we prioritized 4 mega-concepts for in-market testing.

In-Market Experiments

We put the potential offerings in front of thousands of Project Managers, using email tests, landing page tests, ads tests, Lemonade Stand at local and national events, and interviews, to collect signals on what best resonated with the target audience. To derisk the product development, we also created no-code short-term trials to get behavioral and qualitative insights from users, informing the build requirements.

MVP Build and Launch

Peer Insight worked with a development partner and content creators to build and launch 2 products in 8 weeks. The 3-month live MVPs were closely monitored and operated by our small team who played a range of roles from founders to researchers to customer service, and marketers.

Beta Iteration and Roadmap Definition

The Alpha test generated a lot of behavioral, quantitative, and qualitative data that informed how the products need to iterate and scale. We led a series of research and testing rounds to then define the product requirements and a commercial feature roadmap.

Spin in and globally launched as Career Navigator and PMI Picks.

To scale the validated products, PMI assembled internal teams to integrate the experiences on-platform and relaunch the commercial versions in 2021.