A social innovation project analysed with Wardley maps
I’ve been working in social innovation for the last ten years, and from all the projects I’ve taken part in, there’s no one that makes me prouder than Contrata Trans. This blog post explores its creation analysing the role of our technology value chain, using Wardley maps to reflect on the decisions we’ve made when outsourcing vs developing in-house. After four years, this is what we built:
But let’s start from the beginning.
In 2018, my brother and I were in the process of founding a tech-based non-profit organisation. During that time, we discovered that unemployment rates for transgender women were highest than for any other group in Latin America. On the other hand, human resources departments would tell us that they were willing to hire trans women. So we launched a test: we invited them for a training session and printed some resumes. After some weeks, the first company hired a trans woman to work in a catering service.
As organising hundreds of meetings with hundreds of companies didn’t seem reasonable, we decided to build a website that could serve as a means to scale up the project. However, we had really limited resources. With the only objective of testing the concept, my brother pulled an all-nighter and coded a website that could serve as an MVP (minimum viable product). He customised a WordPress template (originally designed for real estate) and made it work for users to upload CVs for companies to visualise.
To be honest, it wasn’t a good site. The filter feature was really limited, and the hosting service worked half the time. Furthermore, malware infected the site after a few months, and most entries were replaced by viagra publicity. However, this beta version enabled us to test the concept, gain insight into its usability, and communicate our idea to donors.
The following Wardley map represents that platform: it was built with minimum functions, customising standard technology.
Two main learnings emerged from that version:
- We needed different types of users with varying levels of authorisation and validation processes.
- We identified which new functionalities were a priority for each type of user.
We began to develop a new site, and after some months, we launched the second version. This platform enabled a new phase for the project that started gaining traction. After two years, we had already partnered up with dozens of companies and began receiving emails from other organisations in Latin America that wanted to copy our model to implement it in their countries.
However, the technology was still insufficient to scale up: it was not user-friendly enough, and internal processes demanded too much time to follow up with every recruiting process. We had a call to make: invest in an in-house developing team to keep up with the program’s growth or become less dependent on the platform. In the end, the core of the operation was done by email and phone on a one-on-one basis.
We discussed this for weeks. In the end, we realised that we were facing a false dilemma. Technology was only part of the issue: we should zoom out and attend to our whole value chain.
Instead of developing everything in-house, all sections of the platform that didn’t require login were migrated to Wix, giving autonomy to the communication team to edit it without depending on the IT team. Furthermore, we developed new integrations: with our CRM for data visualisation and better follow-up, with a specialised payment gateway to receive donations and with our online Campus for training.
In 2022, when this development sprint was launched, the team in charge of the project already had six people. Only one of them had the skills to interact with our developers, and moving towards more standardised technology enabled us to focus on the operations without investing so much in staff tech training. Most parts of the process were integrated into Salesforce (the CRM), which the team already knew how to use. On the other hand, we decided to keep developing part of our technology in-house to respond to the program's specificities, customising functions and levels of privilege for different users and responding to specific user needs. After a while, for example, we decided to enable trans entrepreneurs to sell their products online.
In the last four years, the program has worked with more than 135 companies, finding a job for 279 transgender people in Argentina. More than 80.000 people took the online courses, and since last year, the program has been replicated in Colombia. Operations are to be launched in Mexico this year.
The online platform always played a central role in the program. However, balancing between using technology to enable new processes and scale up the program versus creating unnecessary bottlenecks was not always easy. The Wardley map is a tool that will help our team visualise our whole value chain and better analyse the risks of outsourcing or developing our own technology, making wiser decisions regarding which capabilities need to be developed within our team.
