Individual reflection

I learned strategies and tools to start a project idea in this class. We discussed and iterated our ideas in the beginning and converged to the current idea — plates, a food group-order platform helping people enjoy convenient, affordable, and enjoyable meals. When brainstorming our ideas, we brought up issues that happen in our daily life, such as the unaffordability of food delivery, bike theft, food waste, etc. Though most of us wanted to do something for social good, we ended up not doing those because of the time, effort, and resources needed to work on those. Still, I love this idea we have now and enjoy the time working with my team on making the project more solid. It is interesting to dive into a specific idea and understand potential users’ thoughts throughout this quarter.

I appreciate learning new tools for product management, such as assumption testing, role prototype, style tile, and Kanban, to verify our concept and manage our product. When working in the industry, hypotheses and ideas need to be tested before actually launching to prevent the waste of resources. I believe these tools will be useful for providing proof-of-concept and data to persuade investors/managers to give a green light on the new idea.

However, not all product managers always brainstorm and test new ideas. Instead, some everyday work might be managing project progress and motivating people to work on the common goal. I was excited about this class to learn how to use tools like Kanban to manage project progress. We had guest speakers, readings, and lectures touching on that, but I wish we could have instructions on how to practice it. Some clinics session for consulting on how to manage products and teams would be awesome! I wish we could work more on product work management and role-play instead of mostly on idea verification. Though we assigned roles for each member per two weeks, we did not role-play and did not have a strong PM to organize the project and ensure we achieved the milestones. I wish more instruction could be given on how to keep the project moving and what we do when we switch our roles. Because most of us don’t have experience in product management, I wish we could conduct practices in the industry.

I enjoyed the readings and discussions we had in class, especially the case studies. Those are not everyday situations we will have in school, and it is cool to see and contemplate those cases.

If given more time, I would like to dig deeper into our platform’s logistics and revenue flow. I want more results to ensure our idea is viable from a practical view, including the profitability and the willingness of restaurants to partner with us — previously, we biased more on the student side for assumption testing to verify whether students would be willing to use our service for the sake of time and effort.