What is Build?
The Build Fellowship is an innovative program by Open Avenues that offers a cap-exempt H-1B visa solution, enabling global talent to work part-time with nonprofit and academic partners while securing full-time employment at U.S. companies.
I joined The Build Fellowship at its inception, while the model was still being defined, and was tasked with overseeing product development, leading UX research, and managing key aspects of the project. Through this fellowship, fellows mentor students, contribute to research, and lead mission-driven projects that bridge the gap between international expertise and U.S. industry needs.
As a French national living in Canada, this project is especially meaningful to me, as it addresses the immigration challenges I’ve experienced firsthand and empowers others to realize their potential in the U.S. market.
The problem
Making the Open Avenues model accessible to more nonprofits through The Build Fellowship meant a number of things:
- The model would need to be easily scalable
- The model would need to be flexible
- The model would need to be accessible
And most important, above all else:
- The model would need to remain 100% compliant with the USCIS regulations
- The model would need to keep its overly positive approval rate of 99%
These two specific points would be our main guiding stars throughout this whole project. Compliance above all else. We would be dealing with the future of people and their careers.
Gathering intel
Though familiar with the Canadian immigration processes, the U.S. way of things was pretty new to me. And before even thinking about designing anything, I wanted to familiarize myself with the nits and grits of immigration pathways. Essentially reading through testimonials, immersing myself in Open Avenues' website and resources.
Stakeholders interviews
We quickly figured out that the best way for us to learn would be to learn from those who actually know their stuff, aka the immigration team at Open Avenues.
Along with our Project Leader, we laid out a clear interview planning. We wanted to get as much time as possible with the Open Avenues team to:
- Consolidate our knowledge
- Identify high complexity areas
- Get a clear overview of the current processes
This was a tedious process, let over multiple calls and countless emails. But we ended up with a pretty clear overview of everything, entirely mapped out and detailed. While working on those preliminary flows, I wanted to focus particularly on outlining who was doing what, how, what tool they were using, how much time it was taking etc. We were still in a very "observatory" phase at this point, and the more we could learn the better.
Though this took us quite a while - one to two months - we ended up with detailed deliverables on which we would be able to base the rest of our work.
The details related to this project are under a non-disclosure agreement.
Brainstorming
Now that we had the knowledge, it was time for us to focus more on our main target end users: the team at Open Avenues. We led a (remote) workshop, organized on three main axes:
- Identifying the current pain-points of the team
- Understanding expectations and success metrics
- Brainstorming on how to improve things
After this discussion, lots of pain points, ideas and wishes came out, but most of it can be summed up in the following points:
- We should lean on automations as much as possible WITHOUT loosing human contact and trust
- The previous system was lacking transparency: companies and foreign national usually want to stay updated at all time, which wasn't possible in the previous state of things.
- To ensure scalability, we would need to simplify the tech stack.
Thinking the solution
User flows
Mapping out the flows of The Build Fellowship team during our research process made it clear to us that a lot of time and energy was wasted in manual and repetitive steps.
The first step of our solution-finding process was to identifying all the tasks that could be automated, so:
- Repetitive tasks
- Transactional actions (emails, notifications etc.)
This helped us generate a first batch of user flows that were already a lot more automation heavy, and thus less demanding for the immigration team.
The details related to this project are under a non-disclosure agreement.
Establishing the blueprints
Once we agreed on the first user flows, I started working on more detailed service blueprints to clarify each stakeholders action at the different stages of The Build Fellowship pipeline as well as our future tech stack.
This blueprints ended up being a key deliverable in the project as they helped us to prioritize certain goals and chunks of the project over others. For example, focusing on building efficient back-end automations and a robust data management system quickly became a priority, while actually building out a client-facing platform -- with a login portal and so on -- became more secondary.
What we built
Over the past year, The Build Fellowship's education programming has served over 500 individuals, at 10 partner institutions, with programming put on by more than 100 Fellows. This reflects a 600% growth in individuals served since 2020 along with more than a 300% increase in the number of partner institutions. This is definitely a huge team effort (we have a kick-ass marketing and programming team), and I'm so proud to be able to be a part of it.