This first project was very insightful and fun to do! Initially, I was part of a team that focused on developing a sustainable wedding concept. We collaborated effectively and made great progress. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, the team disbanded, and I transitioned to the DrawMaster Pro team. It was a different dynamic, but I got situated into the team quickly and started understanding more about the norms and how we work together. Being a part of the two different teams taught me how to adapt to a different environment and team setting, something important for PMs during team transitions.
One consistent challenge across both projects was navigating the competitive landscape, commonly referred to as a ‘red ocean’, prevalent in both the drawing app and sustainability sectors. For both parts, it was difficult for me to come up with a novel and innovative solution. This was when I realized that creating something completely new isn’t the main purpose of every company. In DrawMaster Pro, we already have a decent user base. What we were tasked to do instead is to bring in more users, particularly beginners, and hobbiests that may not be in our ecosystem meant for more advanced users already. Thus, creating a feature that was inviting and easy to onboard for newcomers was the goal, and once I and my team realized that we began to make a lot more progress.
Some parts of the project that I liked:
- The company didn’t start from scratch, so we learned how to improve upon an already existing company, something more PMs would have to do if it’s not a start-up.
- Learning about Business Model, BMC, TAM/SAM/SOM
- Having a PM Mentor that was able to review our ideas and give us insight into how to proceed
- The DrawMaster Pro team. We all worked well together and delegated proper work to evenly split up the work we needed to do.
Some parts of the project I wish could be improved upon:
- Having a more clear structure on certain slides. For instance, when looking at the example projects provided, none of them had a slide on the Go-To-Market strategy, so it was difficult to know how to format the slides.
- Letting us know how to make reasonable assumptions for aspects such as the TAM/SAM/SOM. I think having more time to tackle educated assumptions would be important, such as “By researching DropBox/Evernote subscription models, you can see that only 1-2% of users are paid members. Therefore, it would be more reasonable for your company to have around the same rate of conversation realistically if you provide a similar service and business model.” This is something I learned from the meeting with the PM Mentor, Bruce.
- I believe that removing some of the ideation in class would be good. I wanted to understand more about how to create a specific product compared to how to ideate a new business. Thus, I think having a clearer structure as to how many users our company currently has and what our app currently is on the market would be useful. That way, rather than trying to ideate something completely novel, we would have had time during class to build on our app and utilize our current user base to extend our reach and market.
