P1 Individual Reflection (Group 3A)

Starting this assignment, when we were assigned “MusicStreamCo” as our company, I was stoked. I’m a huge music person, and I interned on the Apple Music team this past Summer, so getting a music streaming app (pretty much Spotify/Apple Music) was super exciting. I also came into this class with a very general idea of what a product manager does/is – pretty much nothing more than hearing about the prestigious/extremely selective “APM” program at Google, and that they are the perfect mesh between business and tech-oriented roles, making them an extremely coveted job.

The most rewarding part of this class was simply working on a substantial pitch deck with my team. The process of group discussing, debating, being confused, asking for feedback, discussing more, getting even more feedback, and becoming passionate over a feature of a product that we didn’t even know existed for a few weeks. We made business decisions, conducted market research, worked through financial projections, made acquisitions, and pushed this feature to augment MusicStreamCo and make it a differentiator in the already saturated music streaming industry. I really enjoyed the class discussions and activities that helped us understand the user – such as creating user personas and narrowing down on characteristics that would help us establish a customer niche.

I also really enjoyed the opportunity to pitch our presentation to industry experts like Laura, because I feel we got the guidance/direction that we needed at the right time. Our team was initially confused about the goals of P1 – are we simply pitching an existing company persona provided to us, are we creating a brand new company, or are we creating a product within the company? And if we are creating a product, does it have to be in tandem with the product and revenue models that the company already has? Getting feedback from Christina midpoint of P1 through the pitch helped solidify our direction into focusing on the live-streamed, in-house content feature of MusicStreamCo.

I wish even beyond the scope of this class, we got time to work even more on actually fleshing out a prototype and testing it on real users of Spotify and Apple Music. I’ve found the class to be very fulfilling and enjoyable, and has established the introduction to product management well!