I am a Graduate student here at Stanford, and most of my courses at Stanford were theoretical and rigidly structured. I was craving to witness the much-awaited ‘brainstorming sessions’ and ‘open-ended solutions’ that I had always heard about Stanford. I was feeling a little stuck up with typical AI research projects and wanted to delve into more well-rounded roles such as PM. Some of my friends told me about Christina and how they loved her courses. And I took the leap, and ended up having one of my most enjoyable and rewarding courses till date. Also, this is the first time I am working with a team I didn’t know earlier. I was worried about the understanding and sync of the team, but I never had any problems, and everything turned out to be well-balanced! I should honestly look forward to taking courses having more open-ended topics in the future!
Throughout the course, I kept pushing my boundaries and learning more from the teaching team and through different assignments with my peers. All the topics were insightful, and it was interesting how we were able to stretch the different concepts to our specific product. There were a lot of brainstorming sessions where we were overwhelmed with too many options, directions, or pivots, but discussing in the group guided us to make progress in the right direction. As the main engineer of the group, I thoroughly enjoyed the implementation prototype. Most of my other projects had well-defined data flow architectures, but the Homefood implementation felt like my own brainchild- iterating through different flowcharts and system architectures was fun and knowledgeable.
I learned that apart from being an engineer (which I have planned to be as long as I remember), I love designing new products and being a product manager. I learned how to think of a larger context and have a market-oriented point of view. Thinking from this perspective helped me design better architecture for our implementation prototype as well. We learned how to prioritize customer preferences and make what we can sell. I can now shuffle between different tasks- write a blog, talk through design, run a meeting and then implement the decided prototype, and I feel great about it. There were a few personal hurdles that I faced in this quarter, but overall, I am very happy with the progress I had through this course.
If I had more time, I would love to incorporate the backend with the front end and make the functional end-to-end app. With more time, we could also test a few specific assumptions better- especially about the communication strategies between chefs and customers, and the pre-booked delivery slots. It was very satisfying to see my friends getting excited about the prospect of Homefood, and if I had some more time and more business perspective, I would love to delve into bringing the app into the market and learn the tricks and tips of entrepreneurship through this endeavor.
Finally, I would be seeking out PM internships to further gauge my interests and skills in this domain, and look out for relevant opportunities to widen my perspective from an engineering student to a more well-rounded professional.
