Self Reflection

Entering this class, I was extremely eager to learn more about product management and finally get some hands-on experience in PMing. While I had done a lot of research on this career path in the past, I’ve never had the opportunity to actually do it. In addition, CS 177 was my first ever HCI class, and I was super excited to finally be able to take a project-based course (and I’m excited for the many others I plan on taking in the future!)

I found all of the business centered concepts we discussed in class extremely interesting. Furthermore, I truly appreciate the hands-on component of this course; it was always super cool to discuss with my teammates and use sticky notes to physically map out our ideas. In addition, I really liked conducting the different user interviews, such as with our experience prototypes. Since this was my first time formally doing user interviews, I found it really fun to talk with people and truly get a look inside their mind.

I learned a lot in this class, encountering several concepts that I had never even heard of before—including OKRs, experience prototypes, and the happy path. Many of the activities we did during class allowed me to fully immerse myself into a user’s shoes, which is a part of my brain I’ve never exercised much before. I also became more comfortable using platforms like Figma in this class! In addition, I learned a lot about what goes into creating a startup. This class was definitely more startup-centered than I originally envisioned, but I’ve found that it’s given me a newfound interest in perhaps working at a startup at some point in my life. It’s truly impressive how much goes into it, and I love the excitement of proposing a small idea at the forefront and watching it grow in such a short amount of time.

If we had more time, I would definitely have encouraged our group to expand more from our original idea. I would say that our product stayed relatively similar to our original idea, even though we got a lot of really great feedback from others during the quarter. For example, one piece of feedback I heard from somewhere was that a collaborative aspect to scrapbooking could set us apart from competitors like Shutterfly; I thought that was a great idea, but we never truly got to flesh it out and make it a part of our product. In addition, I would’ve loved to help out more on the technical implementation of our product, as I’m eager to expand my skills in React and frontend development.