2D Individual Reflection

I thoroughly enjoyed my time working on this project despite facing several challenges along the way. The first challenge we faced was that our group was assigned to a relatively challenging topic. The company description made it difficult for us to differentiate our company from other existing real estate giants in the market (I felt as if our company was mini-Zillow). Despite this challenge, we were able to agree on a problem that we all wanted to pursue as a group. However, the second challenge we faced was that we struggled to come up with a solution with high specificity. This was because we did not spend enough time understanding the bottleneck of the problem from both the (1) student’s perspective and the (2) landlord’s perspective (and simply lacked time to conduct enough team discussion). This was pointed out in our feedback from the panelists when we presented our initial pitch in week 4. Learning from this experience, we conducted various market research to determine the exact customer needs of both parties and were able to develop a more focused solution. Lastly, the third challenge we faced was struggling to understand how best to convey our ideas. While we were able to come up with numerous solutions with high specificity, it became increasingly difficult for us to decide which to prioritize over the others. Moreover, our PM mentor (Albert) found many of our slide/logic flows to be unnatural or ineffective in the beginning. It would have been helpful if we had a lecture that primarily focused on how to effectively deliver a pitch, beyond just providing us with a rough structure.

Overall, I believe our team collectively invested substantial effort in creating an effective solution to the problem. While it was often difficult to find time to meet together, we were able to create an environment where anyone could voice their ideas/thoughts comfortably and respect each other’s opinions/constructive criticisms. I believe that as a team of product managers, we were able to complement each other’s strengths in developing this solution. I thoroughly enjoyed working with the team, who were consistently active, collaborative, and supportive of each other throughout the experience.