Accord | Team 15 – Christine, Jenny, Terry, Lynn
Description: What is it?
Accord is an online platform built for product managers, designed to help team members involved in a decision reach consensus more efficiently. The platform offers each team member an ability to submit their highest priority, vote on other team members’ priorities, and see a recommendation from AI accumulated in a decision log.
Problem: What problem is this solving?
Accord helps PMs reach consensus in a more effective way so that teams don’t delay progress to reach consensus when disagreements arise or spend time on superfluous meetings.
Why: How do we know this is a real problem and worth solving?
We interviewed 13 PMs in the industry, and 11 out of 13 of them reported that they have encountered this problem in the workspace and don’t have a good solution for it. One specific quote from a PM at a big tech company writes, “It’s not just the hardness of coming to a consensus, it’s the insistence that there needs to be a consensus to move forward. And the quality of the decision becomes secondary at that point, which is the part that typically hurts every product.”
Success: How do we know if we’ve solved this problem?
We know we have solved this problem if PMs turn to our product when faced with a problem that needs consensus from their teams most of the time instead of another method of resolving disagreements and that these decisions are made successfully.
Audience: Who are we building for?
We are building for PMs at both large corporations and small start-ups who are struggling to come to consensus on decisions with their team.
What: Roughly, what does this look like in the product?
This looks like a website that allows PMs to post “decision questions” in a community post where teammates can vote on outcomes they agree on. It is a collaborative software to allow consensus to easily form among teams and AI agents to summarize finalized decisions. And the PMs pay $38/user/month to use this software through a monthly subscription plan through our site to use our product. This price ensures it is cheap enough for PMs to purchase Accord because the pain point of reaching consensus manually is greater than the $38 software solution we created according to interviews we have conducted.
How: What is the experiment plan?
We want to test if this is the most effective way for PMs to make decisions. We plan to talk with PMs to see if our site, Accord, decreases the amount they spend on coming to consensus. We also want to test the community engagement among teams in the companies to see if employees are willing to honestly give feedback/opinions through our site versus in person meetings.
When: When does it ship and what are the milestones?
We are planning to ship our MVP next week, with preliminary features such as voting, commenting, prioritizing, posting, and copy & pasting to slack. MS1 will be shipped in a month, which includes suggesting recommendations based on the company OKRs and previous decisions made by other employees. MS2 will be shipped in roughly two months, and might also vary according to the user feedback and user data. MS2 includes connecting to Linear, Slack, Google, etc., and distributing the engineer staffing according to their bandwidth of the week/month.
Notes on Reading
From the article “How to identify your ideal customer profile (ICP)” by Lenny Rachitsky, we resonate with the claim that ICPs are extremely important for the company, especially for B2C companies in our case. All of our features in MVP are based on our ICP, tailored toward their needs, pain points, and user journey. Especially when testing with potential users via Reddit and PMs we know in real life, the voting and recommendation systems really resonated with their pain points, which validate that we are solving a real need. We think this focus on tailoring based on specific ICPs and pain points is something we have benefited from until now and we look forward to implementing Lenny’s tips for our future work on Accord as well.
