Individual reflection

Coming into CS177 I did not know what to expect in terms of course content and project management. I thought that PM centered a lot of distribution of workload and scheduling meetings to aid software engineers, designers, and other related parties. However through this course, I learned a lot of inter-personal skills that are keen to the success of a product, whether that is knowing when to stop a discussion or how to neogitate with teammates to keep project on track. Furthermore, I was very excited to actually step through all the process necessary to build out a product with team members.

During the project building phase I learned to conduct research and actually interact with people to gain insights on what they like. Although the team originally had an idea in might, I allowed the customers to take the lead in generating ideas they want to resolve their troubles at hand. What i thought was a super important takeaway from the lecutre is that “You want to create what people want and what you think people want.” The financials and market research was definitely more of my style while understanding what data strucutre and figma was very new to me. I learned a lot from my team members on how to create a securied structure while ensuring flexibility in usage. The presentation was my favorite part of class we were able to see how other teams generated ideas and recieve useful feedback from other teams, or as I would like to think of them “potential users”. This allowed us to dive deeper into implementation and design of our products.

If we have more time on our hands (and more resources like pitchbooks), I would definitely like to dive deeper into the success stories and technicals of applications like deepL, grammarly, and Linguix (a brand new langauge tool serives that just raised pre-seed). I think looking at their road moad and company business model will allow us to gain a huge insight on how to successflly generate revenue and what customers think the “correct” pricing model is.

Overall I think I grew a lot in terms of understanding PM job and learning how to interact with teammates when building a product.