P1 2D Reflection

Working on this project allowed my group and I to take a deeper dive into real estate, an industry that we had little prior knowledge of. While at first it seemed like a daunting task, we were able to work together to find an undiscovered market in the hyper-competitive real estate world. Learning about the real estate industry will undoubtedly be valuable to our group’s personal lives, and this whole experience also drastically enhanced our product management skills. Due to our own dorms being scattered across campus, we initially tried to conduct a fair chunk of our work asynchronously/remotely. We grew far more comfortable with each other once we began frequently meeting in person, which greatly improved our ability to collaborate. An aspect of product management whose importance can sometimes be overlooked is the ability to foster a good working relationship with the other members of the team, and I think we were able to reap the benefits of this in-person collaboration, helping to build trust and make communication more effective.
Despite being introduced to our mentor, Albert, towards the end of the project, his insights and feedback were invaluable to our process. Going into one of our meetings, we had far too much material to fit into the five to six minutes we are allotted for our presentation. Albert helped us to prioritize the problem we found and the solution we came up with, in order to most effectively give our pitch, adding the additional information to our appendix.
On a more personal note, this project began to fill in a lot of the gaps in my knowledge about creating a new product that persisted after CS147, which did not necessarily focus on the business end of the product. While we conducted extensive user research in the course, and thoroughly went through the design process, we never had to consider how the product would generate revenue. Doing more in-depth market sizing and financial projections allowed us to more completely understand the entire process of creating a new product.