1b Individual Reflection

I found this project to be insightful and thought-provoking. I am not someone who is very artistic or uses many creative tools and through this project and our company, DrawMaster Pro, I got to learn a lot about this niche industry and it’s diligent users.

Some parts of the project that I liked:

1. I liked that we were given a company to work with and did not entirely start from scratch
2. I liked that we had a presentation check-point because that served as a real wake-up call for our team
3. I liked that this was a team project because it gave me exposure to the team-management portion of product management
4. I liked that this project deadline was extended because there was a lot of work required
5. I liked that our lectures addressed some of the project requirements (BMC, TAM/SAM/SOM).
6. I liked our team because despite everyone being busy, we always managed to pull things off on time and were generally very respectful and civil with each other.

Some part of the projects I did not like:

1. At times, the project felt more like a design-thinking project instead of a product-management project. We were wasting so much time on ideating and deciding what to launch instead of spending time on how we are going to launch or doing rigorous business calculations. While ideating is certainly a key component of product management, it felt unnecessary and unjust in the context of this project because we were not talking to users or doing any research of that sort. For the future, I would love for the company spec sheets to be more detailed with a clear project idea outlined. Let’s remove the ideation portion directly from this project and let teams focus entirely on aspects like market research and financial projections.
2. I wish all parts of the project slides were covered by in-class lectures. This slide structure is critical for any pitch students may want to create in the future and a slide by slide walk-through (even 10-15mins each class) on how to create the best slide for that topic (i.e. introduction, financial projections, etc.) could be very useful
3. I wish there was more tangible data to work with. Instead of having 20 different companies, make 2-3 companies with lots of fake data generated for each company. Assign teams the same company but different problems within each company. Give access to all the data. This could encourage students to be more quantitative in their projects instead of being so “design-thinky”

Overall, I am very happy with our team’s performance for this project and I am excited for the next portion of this class!