University Involvement in Handshake's Product Process

Having just finished another fantastic product workshop on events and fairs with our university partners, we wanted to take a quick moment to recap a few key details about Handshake's product building process. 

Handshake's Product Focus

As a reminder, our product focus areas for the coming year will be:

• Insights and access to data
• Career services management suite
• New initiatives that embed career services more deeply into the Handshake experience

Handshake's Product Building Process

The image below outlines our product building process - anyone who has attended one of our product workshops this fall will likely recognize it.  What you’ll see noted in RED are all the ways we have now integrated our university partners into the process:

Here are details about each stage of involvement:

Product Workshops

These sessions are designed to incorporate scaled feedback and interaction from our university partners on particular areas of our product. We’re in data gathering mode and are looking to understand the problem we’re all trying to solve or the outcomes we’re trying to achieve. We have to thoroughly understand and frame the issue properly to consider possible solutions that will have the best impact for the entire university partner community. 

• Our next virtual product workshop will focus on collecting feedback on our Appointments feature.  You can register to attend the workshop on December 10th here!

Mini Advisory Boards

We want to include as many university partners as possible around the areas they have the most expertise or interest in. Thus, instead of one static advisory board, we’re creating mini ones centered around the different product areas we’ll be working on. We’ll cap each mini advisory board to about 20 people and we’ll ask for a certain level of commitment from you when you apply. Our criteria for selecting individuals will be to ensure we have strong representation across different types of institutions. 

• We'll be reaching out to folks who have been selected to serve on our Insights and FDS mini advisory board in the coming days.  Thanks to all who applied!
• Having just completed our product workshop on Events and Fairs, we’ll be releasing the application to serve on our mini advisory board for events and fairs soon!

Product Roadmap Webinars

These webinars will share detailed mock ups of plans for the product, based on the previous product workshops and in consultation with the mini advisory boards. 

Beta Groups

Particularly for larger releases, we’ll utilize beta groups to initially test the new feature or product change. For those that applied to be on a mini advisory board and weren’t selected, you’ll have first dibs on being in the beta group. 

Product Feedback

Everyone is always welcome to share ongoing feedback with us via support tickets (so we can track) and through your normal conversations with our team. We review every piece of feedback and it gets taken into account alongside all the other feedback stages outlined above.

We're incredibly excited to continue partnering closely with your teams through these channels!  Keep an eye on your inbox for more details on upcoming product updates!