5 lessons I learned from a 5-week product design challenge
Creating a product in 5 weeks with 5 hours time commitment a week? I will elaborate in this article about my experience doing exactly that. Before getting to my lessons learned from this challenge, I want to go back to how it all started.
I received an email that I was selected for an interview to join the Collab[X] community. The interview went well, and I got in! I immediately joined the Slack channel and was assigned to the Culture Fit pod. The goal was to create a product that helps individuals connect with employers and like-minded people for employment primarily on the basis of cultural fit.
Culture fit is described as the fit between a (potential) employee and a company’s values and mission. One of the reasons why it is important as mentioned at Forbes, is that it enables a long-lasting relationship between an organisation and employees by sharing the same values, as these cannot be taught. Harvard Business Review argues that cultural fit and diversity are not mutually exclusive: you don’t have to hire the same people to have cultural fit. It comes down to an alignment on values and mission.
We had time until August 29th to meet our team members and kick-off the collaboration. Once a week we had team meetings to discuss the progress and in 5 weeks we created a mobile app focused on making it easier to connect professionally to companies, groups, and individuals.
Why?
To help people to expand their network and make it easier to contact others and understand whether there is a cultural fit with the organisation.
How?
By matching the user’s personal interests, values, and industry fields they want to work in, to companies, groups, and individuals working at companies that match the user’s interests.
What?
A mobile application that shows you matches, so you can start chatting in groups or directly to employees who share the same interests as you.
How did the challenge look like for us:
Week 1: kick-off, presentation of problem, crazy 6s ideation session
Week 2: discuss and choose one of the 6 ideas and sketch
Week 3: start designing & coding, iterations, presentation MVP
Week 4: usability testing & iterations
Week 5: pitch on demo day
Lesson 1: take time to empathize
This was the first cohort of the Collab[X] and everything was still new and open for discussion. I was assigned to the Culture Fit pod as a designer, and I was thrilled to work together in a team where everyone had a different role. The whole idea of creating a product that could be shipped at the end of the challenge was also something that excited me. Even though later on, I wish I didn’t push that hard for quick completion. Biggest issues with challenges like these are the time limitations. Even with a time limitation, if you have defined the problem well and have done your research well, you should be able to continue. The field research in our project was already done by our product manager. As a user-centered researcher/designer and being involved in user research myself during my previous projects, I missed the connection when I was presented with the findings only during the first meeting, as we jumped directly into the crazy 8s (in our case crazy 6s). We had no personas, no user journeys and only user stories. Is that enough? In retrospect, I doubt it.
Lesson 2: start simple
There were a couple of user stories and at first, the team wanted to tackle all of the issues described in them. Instead of starting off simple and adding features along the way, we had a massive app in mind with tons of features to differentiate our app from others. Guess what? We ended up removing them one by one. I might’ve been affected by some kind of loss aversion in this case, where the pain of removing features felt more powerful than the gain of simplicity, even though I was actually the one advocating for simplicity from the very beginning. So for the next time, I would even argue stronger for the basic features at the beginning and make these stand out in the designs.
Lesson 3: team alignment is important
Looking back at our teamwork, I really liked the way our interests were aligned. Having people with different perspectives work on the same goal is crucial. Each member of the team was trying to create a product and was focused on this. There were no political games involved, and that’s what made it a nice environment to work in. Also, since it was a small team consisting of only three people, it was easy to get everyone’s ideas into consideration and have fruitful discussions.
Lesson 4: test & iterate
Usability testing was really helpful, and I cannot emphasise enough how important usability testing is for the development of a product. Indeed, when you’re developing a product you don’t see issues that users spot instantly. The same applied to our case. For instance, there was a remark about the location aspect in the matching suggestions. We hadn’t thought about that. If you’re living in Hungary and are looking for jobs in Hungary, it doesn’t make sense to match you with companies and individuals in other countries, unless you’re willing to relocate of course. So after receiving that feedback, we kept “worldwide” as default and incorporated a “change location” button on the homepage.
Lesson 5: trust your gut feelings and don’t rush into completing
I was not happy about the designs I made and asked feedback, but didn’t get any that changed the designs drastically. Along the way, we changed a lot of what the final product would contain, because of technical constraints (it wasn’t feasible to continue with the chatbot given the timeframe to implement it, we also needed copy etc.). We moved away from our original problem statement, which was focused on helping the recruiters in finding suitable candidates and created something else in order to finish the challenge. Now that the challenge is over and we presented our project to a panel consisting of product, design, software people from Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter, I feel even worse. I see it as a trade-off that you have to make: either you fail your team who have worked together with you and refuse to present what you have or set your principle on not rushing into completing something you don’t feel confident about. I chose the former in this case, but I’ve come to realise that I will embrace the latter as a core principle from now on in my career.
These were the 5 lessons, I’ve learned from the collaboration. Overall, it was a great experience to be part of it and learn along the way.
