Rapid Learning Cycles

When we launched GripTape, one thing was certain:

We didn’t know the solution. But we did know the problem: All across the country, young people were passive recipients of an education that they found increasingly irrelevant and disengaging.

We knew that we wanted to flip that on its head — to put youth in the driver’s seat of learning. Starting with a sense of both urgency and ignorance led us to make two commitments.

First, we weren’t going to guess what young people wanted, but rather co-create something that would work for them. Second, we were going to learn as fast as possible so we weren’t wasting time headed in the wrong direction.

We applied user-centered design (which translates into keeping young people’s needs front and center all the time) and “lean startup” methodology and, together, these approaches let us dream big, learn quickly, and grow our work in scale and quality.