Captain’s Log, stardate: March 11, 2022
Exponential + Product Research findings... very encouraged!
“Captain’s Log” is a series where I share a snapshot of how things are progressing across the ministry. Subscribe for the latest with Lightworks!
It’s been an incredibly encouraging week at Lightworks! Spent a few days at the Exponential conference, a national conference for church planters hosted in Orlando, and made some significant connections. Also was able to test some new iterations of language on how to describe what we do in laymen’s terms and got some great feedback as well.
We’ve also been hard at work (Leah primarily) getting through a set of user-interviews for our product wireframes. You can see more about the research in this video update we shared with our board today:
Highs:
What did I consider wins from this past week?
From Exponential:
Great conversations with Jeff Reed of DigitalChurch.Network & theChurch.Digital and his team. Lots of cool opportunities to partner together and collaborate for the sake of more coming to know Jesus.
Connected with several digital church planters with experience starting hybrid (online+offline) churches & digital-only churches. Excited to learn from their experiences and sharepen one another together.
Got to play-test some new language we’ve been using to describe our ministry. Got some great early feedback on our verbal descriptions, but still have some room for improvement.
Generally encouraged and spiritually renewed by the worship, sessions, and conversations with like-minded believers passionate about helping people love Jesus!
Related to the Product:
Overwhelming majority of product feedback was positive, and had maybe half of participants ask to download the product right now!
Certainly seems to be striking a chord with folks - many resonated with both the problem & solution framing, as well as specific functionality within the wireframes.
Completed this round of interviews! Now to move on to synthesizing the data.
Heard some difficult real stories from people we interviewed this week. While hard, these were exactly the type of people we feel called to serve. It gives me faces, names, and stories of people that will spur me on to release this product faster. There are people who really need this product (or something like it) right now.
Personal:
Baby girl started clapping her hands 👏🏻 & tried lots of great new foods this week 🥕
Down-time coming up this weekend! [Thank you, Lord, for the gift of Sabbath!]
Lows:
What did I consider losses or low points from the past week?
Hearing the hurt some of our interviewees have experienced. Incredibly hard to hear, but I’m thankful we were able to minister to them even through the interview process.
Personal responsibilities around the Brooks house took a backseat with the conference & product research. Really want to grow in having meals & groceries planned and purchased before starting the week - didn’t do that, and ate more meals out than we prefer to enable the back/forth.
Also learned how difficult it can be to do local conferences with a baby in daycare. Lots of driving and timing constraints we didn’t experience before becoming parents!
KPIs / Goals:
Reporting key metrics in public to invite discussion and prayer
KPIs (works in progress):
0 monthly active users (all Lightworks digital initiatives) [not launched]
0 monthly active users (digital discipleship app) [not launched]
21 conversations with people about our ministry to continue our learning (“customer development”)
Lightworks Organizational Q1 ‘22 Goals
Register Lightworks Legally
Identified key services to facilitate legal formation. Began working through the initial documents for incorporation.
Publish first website
Met with contractor building the website - continuing to refine language together as she gets up to speed in our website hosting tools.
Digital Discipleship Product Q1 ‘22 Goals
Complete product concept user test (get feedback on problem/solution/core-features hypotheses for the app):
Completed interviews for the user test. Next - identify key insights/learnings & translate into MVP scoping and project plan.
Design product MVP (minimum viable product — the simplest version of the app to release to the public)
Not yet started. Initial wireframes/concepts are complete (used in user test). Scoping the MVP will come out of the user test.
Contract MVP builder
No progress.
Learnings & Questions:
What am I learning along the way? What questions are yet unanswered that are worth exploring more later?
Learnings - Lots... see rest of the update
Questions - Lots... more than what is helpful to share here 🙂
Looking Ahead:
What’s coming up? Where are we heading / aiming?
Next week:
Research synthesis to identify key insights that will inform the next round of product designs.
Board monthly check-in
Continue progressing legal formations
Explore contractor options for MVP building
Coming Soon:
Research findings report (to be shared)
Prayer Requests:
How can you be praying for us?
Pray for the research synthesis process. There is ~15 hours of recordings for us to comb through, with a dense amount of information to make sense of in each. It’s incredibly valuable data to learn from, but also incredibly difficult to sort through. Pray that the Lord gives us speed and wisdom as we work to find the key insights that will inform the next round of product designs.
Pray for increased clarity in our messaging. We’re making good progress in explaining all that we know God’s called us to do, but it’s still taking more work to refine than we had ever anticipated. Praise God for incredibly smart people around us that are helping us through this! [Thank you Zach, Mary, and Jay!]
Pray for stamina. This week was intense! Lots done, praise God, but lots more we want to do. Thankfully not every week includes schmoozing at conferences 😛
Thank you so much for praying with us as we long to give every person with internet access the chance to become disciples of Jesus who walk fully in His ways!
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