Week 3 — Customer Discovery

After traveling to the MCC and JHOC, we have concluded that Not detecting vessels is a far bigger problem than losing vessels in pursuit. We confirmed that the fundamental problem is domain awareness. Agencies involved in interdiction including the Coast Guard and CBP acknowledge that there are many vessels that slip through blind spots in maritime coverage.

As such, we are pivoting away from helping with vessel pursuits, and focusing on expanding detection coverage not with sensor tech, but with better coordinated patrol ops.

Our vision is a single map of patrol schedules across agencies to reduce critical blind spots from overlapping patrols and increase response readiness to a threat.

Weekly Hypothesis: Not sharing steady-state (that is, interagency asset allocation prior to identification) patrol schedules among agencies operations limits vessel identification

Experiments:

We plan to investigate if operators outside of the MCC and JHOC (e.g. CBP, CBET, AMO) have an issue with sharing information during steady-state operations. To do so, we will present to them an MVP similar to the DHS’ ATAK; it will display the current locations of assets across different agencies to visualize blind spots. Additionally, we will be presenting a two axis graph of the problems we have discovered thus far in the interdiction space. One axis will assess whether the problem is common to different groups or unique, while the other one will assess the magnitude of the problem. If our first MVP turns out to not be helpful to interviewees, we will display the graph and discuss other problems to focus on.