Individual Reflection Final Deliverable

When I first signed up to take CS177, I thought that Product Management would align a lot more with what I thought  Project Management would look like. In essence, I thought that there would be a lot of deadline and deliverable aligning, but I’ve realized that a lot of Product Management looks at exploring how the users would react and utilize the product, as well as considering the competitive landscape that the product would be released in. As such, I started thinking through a lot more about user pain points and how the product that my team was creating would fit into the lifestyles and usages of the various users. As the designer of the team, I started creating Figma mockups of various designs for Tandem based on user interviews and features that my team aligned on. I started working with different buttons and various screens to create a smooth experience for onboarding users. Additionally, I helped to facilitate various interviews aimed to gauge interest for our app and various problems that it could solve. I realized that there was a large demand and possibility for implementing our app in a business setting instead of a college social setting, so this led to our group deciding to pivot to a slightly altered business model. I really enjoyed synthesizing various features for our app. Eventually, this led to us prioritizing the features of establishing friend groups, having a notification system built within the app, and community grouping features. I learned that it was really important to clearly communicate both one’s high level vision for the app as well as to align on key features. Especially within a team, everyone has a slightly different perception of where the app could be taken. Thus, it’s really important that everyone agrees on the general direction of how to pivot the app. I’ve also learned that users will have different usages and expectations for products that the creators will not anticipate. Through our user interviews, I’ve learned that a lot of the potential users struggle a lot with mediocrity in approaching the task of reaching out, rather than my assumed perception of users having consistent energy to reach out. This may alter user behavior. If we had more time, I would definitely enjoy trying to work in a rotational program where we would exchange projects with another group and accomplish some work for another group. For example, it would be interesting to PM a different project or act as a designer for another project for 2 weeks, and then swap back. This would allow us to get new perspectives on existing projects and have concrete deliverables to iterate and improve upon. Additionally, I would love to look at more case-study work with concrete deliverables. Our deliverables so far often are blog-posts, but I’d love to work with a diversity of things to turn in.