The project my team worked on was HarvestMingle. At the beginning of this project, we were assigned to a fast fashion company that we immediately wanted to replace. The reason we decided that we did not want to work with the fast fashion company was that we quickly realized that the values of the company did not align with our own and were not interested in the space or market opportunities provided. Thankfully, HarvestMingle was still an option, and we were able to switch out very early on. Once we moved to HarvestMingle, things went pretty smoothly from there. We were very interested in the company’s potential and the market opportunities we came up with that we wanted to pursue. By the end of the project, we came up with culturally authentic meal kits that we are very pleased with and fit perfectly within our company.
Overall, the entire time we worked on the project went very smoothly. We understood the space very quickly and were able to identify ourselves as potential clients of this new market space we were exploring. Being part of/adjacent to the potential users of our market space was very helpful to access potential users for interviews that were crucial to developing our product. Another aspect of the project that I found very helpful was starting with an existing company. This gave us some context and existing resources and values to go off on. I know this is something that was not necessarily helpful to other teams that had to work around a company that they did not fully connect with. Still, in the case of my team, it was super helpful to have this existing information. One thing that I think could have been better about this project was the timeline of the lectures in conjunction with the project’s timeline. Our presentation was scheduled very early on in the process, at a point where we had not covered all of the topics we were expected to have included in our presentation. I think this caused us to spend way more time on those specific slides than we should have spent just because we did not have the lecture content to understand what was expected of us. I know that the presentation was probably unable to be rescheduled due to the guest judges. Still, it would have been a bit nicer to have more explicit expectations going into the presentation. Other than that mismatch in the content of the course and the project timeline, I think we were able to get through the project very smoothly.
In terms of the team dynamics, I think we all worked well together. We were all able to communicate effectively with each other, and all put in equal amounts of effort. We all agreed that our dynamics were so good because we all agreed on what we wanted to work on from the very beginning. I think this was key to a successful project as a team. This was one of my first group projects while at Stanford, and one thing that surprised me was the team norms we had to put together at the beginning. I have never seen this before, and I think it helped us all agree on what we expected from each other, and we all followed through. Throughout the project, we were very good at communicating with each other, we were very respectful of each other’s time, we set deadlines that gave us enough time to work asynchronously, held meetings for synchronous work as well, and overall, we all contributed equal amounts of work which gave us all a peace of mind.
Overall, I had a very productive and enriching time working on this project with my team.
