Week 2 Customer Discovery

After this past week of interviewing various agencies at the local, state, and federal level involved in interdictions and hearing their sometimes conflicting priorities and conflicting concerns, team IntellieSense will be headed down to San Diego and Orange County, where we will interview Coast Guard officers (who perform the interdiction) and Coast Guard managers (who coordinate the operations and manage the data sharing) to get hands-on understanding of what — exactly — is the problem with drug interdictions, and whether drug interdictions are only addressing symptoms to a larger problem?

Weekly Hypothesis: interdiction efforts to identify suspicious vessels are limited by the lack of trust and cooperation between agencies.

Experiments:

We will show these officers our flow chart, asking them their thoughts on the Identify-Interdict-Prosecute framework and where they fit within the framework. We will ask where they believe other agencies fall within the framework, and do these three parts of framework provide different incentives that give rise to conflicting priorities (for instance, if your job is to interdict, then tracking vessels over long periods of time to collect evidence for a prosecution isn’t a priority). We will also show them our MVP of a Google Map overlaid with sensor data of boats and seek their feedback on (a) the MVP is something that would address one of their pain points of limited data sharing and (b) where they see the biggest barrier to data sharing (cultural, legal, or technical).