Self-Reflection

This is probably the first project-based class in college that I’ve taken that forced us to think about the more “real-world” aspects of building products. It proved to be the most challenging part for our team, and I believe this is a really good thing, and certainly what I wanted to learn.

Our team started off with a confident idea about a marketplace product that facilitated rentals for residential parking spots. However, from needfinding, we found that there was not a seller market of city residents to rent out their residential parking spots, and we faced unclear, varied, and risky legal considerations. Luckily, we adjusted quickly and found a shared interest in building a fashion product.

We were excited about the space we were working in and seemed to smoothly identify a problem and solution. However, slowly, as the course progressed, we encountered two ambiguous and challenging problems. First, we didn’t have a solid revenue model. Our immediate inclination was to pursue an advertising model, which makes sense given the nature of our clothing recommendation product. This seemed like an obvious choice; however, we absolutely needed to consider the ethical complexities and ramifications of an ads model. When we did that, our immediate next thought was to consider a freemium model. Yet what was the true value our product was bringing? Why would anyone pay money to use Quinn?

This leads to our second challenge, which is an amalgamation of a few challenges. When trying to fit a freemium model to our product, we struggled to differentiate. How were we novel; how were we different from Pinterest or Stitch Fix? This was hard to answer. Was it our machine learning approach? This in itself was one of our greatest challenges. Perhaps we could have thought out the ML-based approach and algorithm a bit more, rather than lightly dismissing the inability to implement ML for our prototype—this is not just a technical matter, but also a product one. Like one of the HBS articles said, the product is what is the most key to differentiation.

I believe that these challenges were only present and prominent because the course required us to think about these “real-world” aspects—how our product makes money, resource constraints, legal and ethical considerations, and how our product would do in the real market. Most of the other courses I’ve taken and done projects for have been heavily scoped, meaning we only had to think about building for the sake of the class. I’m glad we were able to realize these challenges and though I’m still unsure of how to effectively solve them, acknowledging them is the first step! I’m eager to take these learnings with me as I enter industry next year, and I’d love to dive more deeply into these “business”-leaning concepts in my own time. Shoutout to Shana, our TA, and Christina for a great quarter!