This was my first larger group project in quite some time, and while I was pretty nervous going into it (especially with little product experience), I had a great time working with my group and learned a lot from my first product-adjacent experience.
My group originally started with a fast-fashion company, but the company didn’t align with our values, and it immediately felt like there wasn’t a lot of excitement. Fortunately, we were able to switch to HarvestMingle, a physical/online grocery chain, and immediately the difference was palpable. From the start, we all had a lot of different ideas and ways to build off of the presented situation.
While generative, this also posed some of our first group challenges: handling conflict with different ideas. We had a productive and generative conversation where we were able to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses to eventually create a product that we all resonated with and were excited by. Specifically, we found shared interest in our experiences as students and young professionals from multicultural backgrounds who miss authentic, home-cooked food. We had a really strong idea, and being a reflection of our target market helped drive a lot of our decisions around design and strategy. It also provided a higher vision to deal with potential roadblocks that stood in the way of our product. For example, when the issue of customer drop-off came up, we turned to our interest in authentic foods from different cultures as a differentiating factor for customers to be able to continuously try new foods and cuisines.
In addition to developing a strong product vision, here are other things that also went particularly well with our team. A lot of these overlap, but here are particularly important threads:
- Communication
Right off the bat, we established strong communication norms to ensure that we could proactively work together in the ways we wanted. This included both broader norms (e.g. respond to messages, send updates), but also the ways in which we wanted to send those communications (e.g. group chat, okay to text after business hours, don’t overtext and utilize agenda documents for matters that can wait until our meeting). We developed a framework that was intentional and fit to our team’s needs.
- Accountability
The looming fear with any group project is that people will start disappearing and the workload will subsequently fall on you. Through our communication norm, we also established a culture of accountability- even if a lot is going on, communicate proactively and we will adapt. We also set norms for respecting people’s time that allowed our group work time to be more productive, particularly by setting specific, itemized to-do lists after each meeting for everyone to finish before our next meeting.
- Reflection and adaptation
In our class reflection exercise, we incorporated group feedback on having more productive meetings. Previously, while we were able to share a lot of ideas, it often felt like we had no structure, which led our meetings to unnecessarily run very long. We decided to start creating agendas before meetings to be more productive together and stay focused. This allowed us to generate better work and also be respectful of each other’s time.
- Group work and solo work balance
The in-class brainstorming activities (specifically the BMC and assumptions exercises) were super useful in fleshing out our project and learning more about the PM process. We found a good balance between group work and dividing up components to do individually. We developed ideas together, and in doing so created something that we could all stand behind and were proud of. From there, we catered to our individual strengths, such as design or presentation parts we were particularly drawn to. We were able to find a really good balance between unity in our project and dividing the work in a productive way.
Personally, being the only non-CS major, I came in with the least development and design experience. This project didn’t demand too much technical experience, and I found a lot of ways to contribute meaningfully while gaining more exposure to the design and development process. It was a good first introduction to the PM experience, and looking forward, I’m really excited to continue responding to new challenges with a great team that I’ve helped build. I hope to push my comfort level in terms of more unfamiliar target markets (e.g. B2B) and technical skills (e.g working with financials and mapping out technical development). There were some elements of this project that I actively chose not to take on, such as designing the presentation and prototype. Now that I better understand how these elements play out and have a team to support me, I’m excited to take on unfamiliar topics and challenges to develop a more well-rounded PM background. I’m really excited to see where we go from here, as a team and with our products!
