Sprinting Towards the RealDeal

My team would absolutely benefit from carrying out the Sprint process. Due to the fact that our product, RealDeal, is a mobile application, our team could take advantage of a lot of what the Sprint process has to offer. Personally, I believe that the Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday components of the Sprint process would be the most useful in developing and bringing RealDeal to life. The business model canvas allowed us to understand the complexities of our product vision and established a solid, unified foundation for our team. However, by implementing the Sprint process, our team would have direct feedback about our product in less than a week, which could help us immensely before launching the app in malls. Tuesday’s sketch exercises would help us understand what solutions we have for the retail market, giving our team quick, helpful visuals associated with our unique product. Wednesday’s decision making would assist us in determining the right solution for our long term goal with RealDeal. Also because RealDeal is an app, Wednesday could allow us to pit multiple ideas against each other in a rumble and hopefully we are able to recognize several advantages to those ideas because apps can be successful in many different ways. Thursday’s prototype creation give us the opportunity to dive into important components of our app such as the overall interface and user friendliness, which are crucial to RealDeal since we are advertising how efficient the app truly is. Most importantly, Friday’s interviews give our team the ability to get direct feedback from potential users of our app. We’ve known the ins and outs of our app since we first met as a team, so Friday is time to put our app to the test and learn from users what they like, don’t like, and whether or not they would use the app while shopping. Having this data would help us know what our next steps are and how much work we have to go before officially launching our app.

There are a lot of main differences between traditional product development and start up focused customer development. With start up customer development, failure is an integral part of growth. Existing companies don’t typically accepted failure as part of the process, whereas start ups require countless trial and error tests, whether it’s on your pitch, your pricing, your features, or other components of your product. That is simply how start ups grow. In addition, start up job titles encompass much more responsibilities compared to existing companies. In start ups, it is very common for an employee to work in multiple different aspects of the company. For example, someone with a software development background may focus on the coding components of a product but they can also work with the marketing team if they have an interest in branding.

Our start up team plans on “getting out of the office” by setting up kiosks or booths in malls and having potential users run through our app to find real sales in the stores we have partnered with in that respective mall. Our hope is that by helping customers shop and find incredible deals, they will be motivated to download the app on their own accord and incorporate it into their typical shopping experience.