The Magellan program is a customized, comprehensive career management and leadership development program sponsored by Voices, the Black Business Resource Group at Capital One. Approaching its 15th anniversary, program leadership sought to explore what a revamped Magellan experience might look like for future cohorts.
We focused our energy on understanding a few key things: which aspects of the program alums found the most memorable, their perspective on the benefits of the program, and where the program could continue to improve based on their experiences. In addition to combing through years of existing survey feedback, we conducted additional interviews and completed an experience mapping activity with alums to develop a final set of shared insights and common pain points which then informed our ideation session with the Magellan program team.
Though there were more pain points, the bulk of the feedback we received aligned to five major categories: leveling, curriculum, work-program balance, the application process, and cohort leads. Our ideation session with the program team focused on these spaces and generated nearly 100 different ideas on how to improve the program. Dot-voting and discussion helped our team group and narrow down the most promising ideas to a smaller set, which we then mapped on a 2x2 grid weighing effort versus the impact of the idea. We split our recommendations into high-impact, longer-term wins and short-term, easy wins to help the program team prioritize changes that could be made for the upcoming cohort.
To help make insights more actionable, we drew from the original feedback and laid out detailed next steps for each recommendation. To help contextualize the various ideas and proposed changes, we mapped all of the easy wins onto the current program journey, highlighting which parts of the Magellan experience they improved, and similarly mapped long-term wins onto a proposed reimagined journey that accounted for the more substantial program changes. Short-term recommendations were enacted in Magellan for the 2022 cohort.
