Fundação Dom Cabral (FDC), one of the leading business schools in Latin America, faced a critical challenge: only 23% of students completed end‑of‑module evaluations, leaving the coordination team without enough data to improve the quality of executive programs.
I was invited to investigate the problem. Early qualitative interviews made the situation clear: FDC was using Microsoft Forms without a defined process, creating a vicious cycle of inefficiency:
“We spend more time collecting and organizing data than actually analyzing it” vented an MBA coordinator in duty for +7 years. She showed me her manual spreadsheet where she tried to consolidate results from different forms.
The problem went beyond the inadequate tool. Coordination team was overloaded, data arrived fragmented, and students received multiple evaluation requests without seeing practical results.
One interviewed student was blunt: “Why waste time answering if nothing changes afterwards?” The problem had several layers:
The Discovery phase was intense. I’ve conducted 21 qualitative interviews with coordinators and students from different programs. The insights were revealing:
Based on the interviews, I organized a workshop with stakeholders using the The product Is/Isn’t/Does/Doesn’t technique. It was a decisive moment when the Academic Director realized:
“We’re not just building a form. We’re redesigning how we relate to our students.”
Next‑Now‑Later Prioritization helped us define a focused MVP that could deliver value quickly while keeping a forward‑looking vision.
This methodological approach mapped the entire feedback journey and identified opportunities for a custom solution tailored to FDC’s specific needs.
A whole Miro workspace with key findings and insights from different POVs that helped building Personas.
We've created than main profiles of users that actually would make use of the new solution.
As a bonus, I've designed a wireframe and mid-fidelity interface of the system to-be.
Those prototypes would serve to design and build a proprietary evaluation tool that:
A professor who initially resisted the new system shared:
“For the first time in 15 years of teaching, I’m able to adapt my content based on real and immediate student feedback.”
The tool transformed not only an administrative process but the institution’s very culture of continuous improvement. FDC now made decisions based on concrete data, not impressions or anecdotal reports.
This case shows how in‑depth research and user‑centered design can turn an operational challenge into a competitive advantage in executive education, bringing students and the institution closer together in a virtuous cycle of continuous evolution.
Because of internal and bureaucratic reasons, I’m not able to tell you if we got to achieve our business goals or not. However, with those insights in mind we were to target specific KPIs for the first 6 months after MVP launch, listed below:
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