(10/30) Reflection on P1 (Team 1A)

Our Project:

Our team was originally assigned to the TrendyChic boutique, but we felt like that did not speak to our interests, so we switched to HarvestMingle. HarvestMingle (HM) is a chain grocery store, and we developed a meal subscription kit product for the store. We chose to focus on cultural food, since many meal delivery kits do “American food” or white-washed ethnic meals.

MingleMeals was such an interesting product for me. I only have experience with online applications, so the physical store and product combination was new to me. It makes me excited to explore more with tangible products. I am now wondering how different my experience would have been if my team was only building software. How would PM-ing differ?

Our Team:

Our team worked really well together. Here are some reasons why:

(1) Our team norms were specific. We had really clear expectations for each other, and we all have the same level of commitment to the class.

(2) One norm in particular stood out as being the most useful: Each meeting should have an agenda. Either before the meeting or in the first five minutes, we would come up with a checklist of everything to do before dividing the tasks up. This helped us prevent “creeping” of the scope for tasks since they were clearly defined. It also helped us keep meetings short (under 2 hours).

(3) When we did have differences of opinion, we looked at the problem through a third-party/objective lens. Like with all teams, different team members had different visions for the product. One thing we did well was looking at the decision through the eyes of a customer and through the eyes of Christina/the TAs. What would a customer or grader think about the problem? And for disagreements that were trivial, we either picked one and moved on or put both solutions down as possibilities.

(4) We had different skills and worked on different things. We didn’t fully “divide and conquer,” but we did an 80% divide and conquer. We each took certain slides to work on as our own, and then we went through each others’ slides to give feedback and make changes. For example, I took the slides on the target market size, the revenue streams, and the business model.

Not much could have gone better in terms of team dynamics. I do wish we had done some of the class exercises in a different order so that our product was well-defined from the beginning. Laura gave us a worksheet that helped clearly define a need in the market (the one with the three connected circles), and that was super helpful, but would have been more helpful earlier.

Going Forward:

Our team is going to stick together for P2. We’ve learned a lot about how to work well together and are excited to continue working as a team!