Individual Self Reflections

Before joining this class, I was not sure how the world of PMs or startups work. In the first class, when Christina told me about the course content, I had heard of all those terms before, and I wanted to learn the concept of being PMs/Doing a startup. I always looked at this course as an entrepreneurship class instead of a PM class. And I learned a lot about being an entrepreneur. It was like entrepreneur 101 for me. Starting from BMC to User-story mapping, etc. I think the class was dense and involved a lot of writing. I’m not sure how closely this reflects PMs/CEOs’ work in real life, but I thought we could have dived deeper into some of the concepts. I also liked the fact that we had personal space in Durand where we could post our work and spend time working on our projects. Overall, I feel this class was heavy, but I learned a lot from the class about doing a startup.

For Flowy, I mainly worked on the tech parts. I bootstrapped the front end and made changes to fit our needs. I learned a lot about React and JS in general and also about how to use next.js and vercel to deploy our final solution. I wish I could have learned more about designing things from the designers on my team. But overall, it was a great learning experience. We worked like a startup and collaborated to work toward our shared passion for English Education. I think I’m really happy with the state of our current prototype, and If I was given more time, I would have worked more on the backend and development of our initial ML algorithms. Apart from this, doing user interviews was also a lot of fun. A lot of my assumptions that I thought were true were proven to be wrong. E.g.:- I thought people would like to get scores about their speech but what they really wanted were just explanations and NO scores. Another interesting thing for me was to find out the riskiest assumptions and hypotheses and ways to validate them in the real world via user testing.

Being the first Entrepreneurship class, I think 177 was really helpful for me to learn various concepts and formulations about it. However, I wish the class went into more detail about some concepts and was a bit lighter on the writing part.