Building a wellbeing app during COVID-19.
Day 1 of my journey working on a wellness app focussed on preserving and re-living positive memories.
Day 1.
It’s my first day as a product manager for an early stage start-up. I’m owning the business strategy and product within a wellbeing app focussed on preserving and re-living positive memories as a way to get “unstuck” from repetitive negative thinking.
Let me start by saying, I find ‘professional journalling’ to be a little bit intimidating! But my hunch tells me it’s a great way to make sure I’m intentional about each day (i.e. holding myself accountable), learning from and noting down mistakes/resources, and hopefully allowing myself to connect with others on a similar journey.
Some background: I’ve been working in consumer tech for the last few years (including an e-commerce start-up) but definitely not on an app. Well-being and full mind/body health areas of strong personal interest. In the last few months of my recent role as an Entrepreneur in Residence, I’ve been thinking about next steps. After working across marketing, strategy, and product, formal product management feels like a natural fit.
For anyone reading this in present day, it’s probably the worst possible time to get hired (unless you’re an engineer), or try to switch industries/functions. Of course, it’s not completely impossible to break into product management right now. But personally, I found the pressure of that tiny sliver of hope more stressful than motivating.
That said, if you’re in the extremely privileged position of not too many other responsibilities, you‘re generally doing okay emotionally, have some financial runway, AND it’s how you might like to spend your time— it’s actually a great time to learn new things, gain practical experience and build products.
That’s where the title of this post comes in. To build up my skillset further, I’m working on product within an exciting and very early stage app in the wellbeing/mindfulness space. It’s an opportunity for me to work full time on a project I believe has a lot of potential, and document my learnings/process along the way.
As you probably already know, wellbeing has become a very trendy and relevant topic (with over 450 million individuals current struggling with mental health). The efficacy of modern mindfulness approaches might be debated, but the essence of the movement feels more all encompassing than ever. So many people I know (myself included) are often just surviving, rather than thriving in our daily lives. To feel “better,” we meditate, talk to friends/therapists, run it off, drink, draw or paint. But many of us are still finding the right combination of approaches to lead a more balanced and whole life. That’s what intrigues me about this potential new solutions based on preserving and re-living positive memories. So, here we are.
Day 1 focus: get up to speed, refine and articulate the problem statement.
Day 1 was mainly around getting a lay of the land and creating structure for the next 40 days (4 weeks until we have engineering resource to build the first iteration of the app, with time for iterations built in). I spent the day creating structure (daily stand ups, goals for each day/week, sprint overview), and acting as much like a sponge as I could. I read through existing documentation and strategy to understand the founder’s mission and vision, looked at existing research on the target market, did some competitive analysis, pep-talked myself into writing this Medium article, and looked closely at the app prototype.*
*Prototype already?! I know, I was surprised too. We have some accelerated timelines due to resource constraints so while we can’t “do things in the ‘right’ order” we can certainly try and make sure we have our bases covered. That might be why I was brought in — to really focus on our customers and hone in on a clear business and product strategy.
As a pair of fresh eyes to the project, I wanted to make sure we were able to articulate the very specific problem/opportunity we were focussing on with this app, and that we were sure we had the right target market in mind. The concept of the app was based on years of research and science, but were we sure people would actually use/want it? Doing this would of course shape the design of the product, the type of customer research we’d continue doing, and our go to market plan.
Stay tuned! I’ll share my learnings on both the niche part of wellness we’d like to operate in, and our approach to building this app so it’s as effective as possible for the people who’d like to use it most.
Things I read while writing this:
