Time to Get Extra Rigorous — Jan ’22 company update
I recently started writing public company status updates. You can read more about why here.
Ask: I will be in Miami Florida for the second half of Feb / early March. I would love to meet founders, investors, and community builders there. Who should I meet?
Previously at Aggregate Intellect…
In December ’21 …
- I wrapped up nearly 50 user interviews and compiled notes from those
- We did a design sprint about a fairly major pivot we were considering and ended up with our main assumption invalidated, but with a very good new approach that came out of our focused conversation and user testing
- We deployed the first iteration of our “paper recommendation system”
- We deployed the first iteration of our “chrome extension”
- We improved our mobile compatibility and SEO
- We made significant progress on many community projects
- We started thinking more deeply about our community strategy for 2022
See also: October ’21 | November ‘21
Here is what happened in January 2022:
In late November when the idea of the pivot emerged for the first time, we made a decision to be laser focused and intentional as we explored that. We also decided to be better at soliciting input from everyone in the team about decisions like that without having to spend all our time in meetings. Hence the design sprint! But we also needed to make ongoing process changes to make sure what we learned from the sprint continues to take effect.
Elora, our product designer, suggested we do micro-design sprints every week by inviting everyone to our weekly product sync. The idea evolved to the following: we show up and talk about 3–5 important design questions we want to answer [15 mins] >>> have 2–3 users join us, do breakouts and interview them (using live website, or prototype, etc) [20–30 mins] >>> huddle and review action items [20 mins]. Then more async conversation about potential improvements on Slack and Figma. So, we get everyone’s input (staff & users) every single week in a very efficient way!
Another thing Elora and I decided to do was daily user testing. Before we used to jam a bunch of users in a few days, talk to them, and then nothing for a long time. Now, we try to talk to exactly one user every day, and make decisions based on their confusions and desires instead of our “feelings”. Continuous but spaced out interviews also allow us to react to the needed changes on an ongoing basis.
The first step to prep what to show to users in all the above was to come up with a rigorous way to compile all the learnings from user interviews and design sprint into a unified story that is the summary of everything. This way we don’t have to keep going back to the notes for every single decision. So, we used a user journey map AND separately a user story map! But first I needed to relearn what the difference of the two is and how to use them:
- Journey Map is essentially the users’ workflow including their inner dialogue (feelings?) as they go through the steps in that flow. It reflects what tools and processes they currently use, and for each step of the process, details the users’ situation, objective, actions, and feelings.
- Story Map is your ideas on what you need to build, including a detailed user experience that reflects the journey map — aka user’s workflow. It provides, in as much detail as possible, what features your product provides for each of the user journey steps, what actions users would take, and what the outcome of those leads the user to the next step.
Of course these two are related and you can put them on the same chart etc (like I’ve been doing), but now I know that’s a bad idea. Keeping them separate allowed me to focus on what the user is trying to do, and separately what can we give them to facilitate that!
So, we wrote these down, everyone provided async feedback on them, we iterated until we made some decisions, and then Elora turned the most important steps that we wanted to include in our next release into a Figma prototype that we’ve been testing.
A lot of the above is motivated by the fact that we are starting to finalize our plans for a Seed Fundraising round:
- We spent a bunch of time deciding strategic plans for what types of investors we want to talk to and for what objective in the next 6 months.
- Then overlayed our product roadmap on that and tried to clarify what product milestones are necessary for each phase
- Then we decided on what design, R&D, dev, and community activities need to happen to meet the product milestones and distribute the outcome.
- Then we needed to decide what quantitative growth story we want to tell investors, what our current numbers and leading indicators for our target numbers are.
- Trim the product roadmap based on what’s feasible to build AND distribute, and iterate until the whole thing is a consistent and exciting story
All the above is still ongoing… So, make sure you subscribe to this newsletter so that you can learn where we landed
What were the highlights of the month for the team?
Dev & Design Team
Of course with all the changes we’ve made on how we are approaching design, the team is happier with the process.
My proudest contribution of January would be unifying the user journey and continually iterating on designs and prototypes to reflect the needs and wants of users
We spent quite a bit of time writing an NSERC + Mitacs grant application that will allow us to hire a few postdocs, grad students, and RAs in collaboration with our academic partners to push forward our R&D activities for the next few years.
With the grant application out of the way, I can finally catch up on all the papers that came out recently
On the other hand, we finalized R&D and deployed some changes to our recommendation engine so that it can take in more general inputs (instead of just recipes) and rank more general resources (instead of just papers).
My proudest contribution is the resource level recommendation and handling the edge case where no concepts are detected in the query
Our recommendation engine largely only uses info that’s explicitly provided by users at the moment. We created some pipelines that fetch additional information related to each resource users save on our platform. This provides less manual work for users, and more data for our engine to work with! win-win!
My contribution is creating auto-fetching pipeline for Arxiv, GitHub, and YouTube, along with fixing several small bugs
We launched our chrome extension last month, if you remember. After some early user testing, we noticed an opportunity to reduce the number of clicks and manual entries that the user has to take with more careful caching (and some assumptions about users’ work patterns).
My proudest contribution this month was to make the chrome extension cache some values and repopulate when needed
A pretty significant release for us this month was an integration into Notion, because we realized that’s a tool a lot of our users leverage. Now they can create their RECIPEs in Notion and then import it to our platform.
My proudest contribution is the Notion page to RECIPE conversion! I didn’t believe I could finalize it this soon, but Ammar pushed me to deliver this on time.
This integration is an important part of our community initiatives and therefore Ammar wanted it to be ready as quickly as possible.
In using our own tool, we realized that we often needed to mention other users, concepts, resources when taking notes, but our Markdown editor didn’t allow for that natively. So, we fixed that.
My proudest contribution has to be changes I made to our note editor for mentioning, and deploying the first version of Workspaces for keeping track of resources related to one project
Finally we added some new functionalities to our Library.
My proudest contribution is the sorting capabilities for the library page which also supports sharing of the sorted and/or filtered view with other users.
Community and Growth Team
One of our highest priorities this month was finalizing our 2022 community engagement strategy. You can see the changes here.
I’m really excited about all that’s coming — come Feb. after finalizing & condensing months of discussions regarding Community Changes
And, of course, as it has been our tradition of celebrating and empowering diversity in tech, we have some exciting “women in ai” events coming up.
I’m most excited about how the planning for WinAI Week is coming together. We’re less than a month out as the event is kicking off on Mon, Mar 14th. We’re making great progress with partners for a week filled with virtual events showcasing awesome women in the space, and they’ll be covering a wide range of interesting topics and speakers
A lot of our community projects and discussion groups took a break in December and have been slowly ramping up again!
We concluded the GNN Foundations discussion group and this time we had more people staying with us until the end than the previous cohorts!
We have some exciting news around the “environmental data science” discussion group with some workshops and projects. Make sure you’re part of our slack workspace to get notified about that (join here).
Probably nothing, but did i say that we were mentioned in Forbes?
Parting thoughts…
I was telling a friend a few days ago that Jan ’22 has been the most productive I have felt in the past year or so. Rigor, purpose, and process makes such a big difference in execution, and that’s the most important thing you need in a startup.
Want to talk about any of the above? or about your career in ML?
I do free 20 minute calls with people to talk about everything ML or startup; if you know anyone who is trying to get into ML / DS, or figuring out how to build an AI product, or thinking about getting into startup life, AND wants to chat about it with me, please pass this link to them: https://calendly.com/amirfzpr/20min-ama
