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Samsung

Coaching Samsung's Next‑Gen Innovators

Finding product-market fit through Design Thinking

Samsung Solve for Tomorrow key art: a participant in front of a wall of sticky notes, beside the line Tomorrow. It starts with an idea.
Samsung

Case study 08

My role

Workshop Facilitator

Client

Samsung

Industry

Innovation, Sustainability

Skills demonstrated

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How I opened the room

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Brands you know, products you've never heard of, because none of them survived. That is product-market fit, taught in ten seconds, and it is how I opened the session.

Workshop slide: Cheetos lip balm, Colgate ready meals and Cosmopolitan yogurt, none of which survived
Summary

Samsung's Solve for Tomorrow competition challenges 16 to 25 year olds to build sustainable technology that helps their communities, with £10,000 for the winner. I was brought in to teach the session that decides whether an idea survives contact with the real world: finding product-market fit. Across two cohorts, I took forty young innovators from a rough idea to a defensible value proposition, using the same product-strategy tools I use with startups, taught so a sixteen year old could pick them up and run with them.

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What I taught

The core of early product strategy, in the order a founder actually works through it. Applied, not theoretical.

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How I taught it

I built the workshop around doing, not listening. That was the work: adapting a complex topic for the people actually in the room.

The customer whose interview the room listened to

01 · Learning by doing

We listened to a customer interview.

Delegates built a persona live from a fictional, but realistic customer interview I ran in the room.

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02 · Collaboration and shared understanding

A live wall of research, built by the whole class at once.

They captured pains, needs and motivations in real time, posting their findings through Mentimeter and watching the responses pool onto a single screen as they arrived.

They left with the templates

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03 · Real examples with relatable brands

Every concept anchored in a brand they already knew.

This group was young, so nothing was taught in the abstract. Every idea arrived through a product they could recognise and understand: product-market fit through Cheetos lip balm and Colgate ready meals, differentiation through the SURI toothbrush, which they pulled apart against its competitors, and jobs-to-be-done through Uber.

The take-home

My job was translation: taking something as ambiguous and multifaceted as product-market fit and making it clear enough that a room of teenagers could understand and attempt it.

Delivered live, twice, for one of the UK's flagship innovation competitions.

Testimonial

Great session yesterday and looking forward to the next one. We've had a lot of really positive feedback come in already from the younger age group.
TB Tom Batson
Samsung Account Manager, We Are Futures (delivery partner)

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