Shorelight

Since its founding in 2013, Shorelight had built an impressive growth machine on the back of a differentiated student experience and global agency partnerships. The model worked—until it didn't. By the time they brought us in, growth was slowing and the explanation was not obvious. The student experience was strong. The brand was strong. The agency network was strong. What had changed?

$1B valuation unblocked · 3 customer segments identified · Inside Sales merged with Admission and Enrollment Services · Journey-based experience metrics adopted

“Shaun and his team were amazing to work with, and their findings and recommendations are already having an impact on Shorelight at the highest levels; we are actively changing our corporate strategy based on their work.”

— Mark Brown, VP of Marketing

Growth Was Slowing, But Why?

I led a service-design engagement to map four interlocking systems: the student experience, the employee workflows behind it, the technical systems supporting both, and the business performance metrics the company was actually using to manage growth. Together with my team, we synthesized Shorelight's existing qualitative research into personas and customer journeys so the four systems could be analyzed side by side.

Two findings emerged.

The first was a market focus finding. Shorelight's existing service model satisfied only one of three potential customer segments. The three segments differed in behavior across the journey—how they researched, what they evaluated, what made them commit—and the journeymaps surfaced those behaviors phase by phase. That structure revealed why specific marketing initiatives, such as online-to-offline webinars at the consideration phase, would matter at key moments for each segment. The maps were structured so executives could see at a glance—what one of the leaders called “passing the squint test”—how the three audiences differed. In essence, the model that had powered the company's first five years of growth was, by the time of our engagement, designed for only a third of the addressable market.

The second was an organizational finding. The internal workflows and systems had grown so quickly that they were complex, contained multiple hand-offs across functional teams, and were measured in ways that worked against the student experience. The very functions Shorelight had built to rapidly scale had become the bottleneck. Organizational structure, workflow, and performance measures, designed for the first version of the business, were now constraining its next version.

Results

Shorelight used the journey work to attract and convert new kinds of students, expanding the addressable customer pool. The company merged Inside Sales with Admission and Enrollment Services—necessary to deliver a cohesive experience from application through enrollment—and adopted journey-based experience metrics in place of the function-by-function measures that had been working against the student. Marketing launched a series of engagement and conversion initiatives based on the insights embedded in the journeys. The strategy and structural changes together unblocked Shorelight's path to a $1B valuation.

The Takeaway

When growth slows, the first instinct is to look at the marketing funnel. But, frequently, the problem goes much deeper, involving the structure of the organization itself. This structure can blind an organization to a customer it’s not yet serving and cause the organization to optimize for and measure the wrong things. For Shorelight, these issues were compounding one another. Service design makes such issues visible enough to argue about—and forces the conversation about what has to change at both the tactical and strategic levels.