Product Management / Projects

Dr. Buchanan's vision and leadership is rooted with a product management mindset that is responsive and collaborative to the needs of students, college, industry, and business.
Leadership: Product Management Mindset
Every single support and service we offer and innovation we develop is a institutional product. Leading with a product management foundation invigorates team members because they can actually see how they are apart of a process from beginning to end to support their customers (students). Through product management, I have watched team members have a renewed faith and trust in leadership because roles are defined, ensuring the student's voice (needs and wants) are central to the problem to be solved, metrics are established (KPI's and OKR's), and outcomes are realized. There is nothing more amazing than watching your team realize goals and understanding the true path that got them there. Additionally, watching a team fail but instead of blaming, they are able to work through other hypotheses to consider a different route. Leading with a product management foundation creates better products, better teams, better efficiencies and effectiveness, and most importantly better aligned goals and results.

Examples of a current projects in my portfolio are outlined below that showcase the situation, tasks, actions, and results that were taken through a product management lens.
 Current Projects
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  • In my role as Vice Chancellor, we have been reviewing our data on barriers to student success (persistence and credential completion).
  • While our college offers many services to support students through unexpected circumstances or life challenges, our students shared that it is not easy to access these services nor do we provide a central location to support students.
  • I worked with the leadership team in my area to review our social support ecosystem and lead them through the design-thinking process to develop a product to respond to the students (customer) needs and wants. Through student surveys and hypothesis prioritization, we were able to identify that our college did not have a place for students to receive social support services, get food support, and other services from ACC and external partners.
  • The product we developed was the first-ever Student Care Center on our Highland Campus which is centrally located. In the next year, the Student Care Center will be supported under an advisory team to establish KPIs and OKRs once it officially opens Fall 2023. These measures are important to support growth/scaling to multiple campuses and sustainability of this student support service.
  • In my role as Vice Chancellor, our college partnered with The Make It Movement to support students with identifying a high demand/high wage career. Whether those students were in K-12 or adults looking to up-skill or re-skill. The problem we wanted to solve was related to students not understanding what they would actually do in careers such as advanced manufacturing or becoming knowledgeable of all the careers in health sciences, etc.
  • Our partner initially wanted to support this problem by developing a website with a call center of navigators to help support interested students. The website is a wonderful initial step for career learning.
  • My role was to create a partnership and determine a vision and direction for the college. After review of student surveys, focus groups, school district leaders, and business and industry, ACC determined the best approach was to create a center that curated hands-on experiences for career exploration.
  • I also identified the best mastermind leaders in the college who could spearhead this endeavor through collaboration. The result and final product were the development of a 10,000 square feet space of hands on career exploration through augmented reality; with an additional 150 experiences in 3D and 4D.
    • The Fab Lab enables career explorers to design and build with a 3D printer. An example hands-on experience includes building a Food Truck and developing a food truck business.
    • A showroom that offers demonstrations of some of the most fascinating careers. Examples include saving a life, working in the financial industry, firefighting, welding, working in a health lab, etc.
    • The Simulation Zone provides augmented related in 3D and 4D with haptics that simulates not only the experience but the feeling of the work. Examples include truck driving, welding, construction, surgery, etc.