Top 5 Challenges We Have Been Facing So Far In The Hacking4Impact Class
We’re halfway there—how are we doing?
In case you’ve missed the last two articles, you can learn more about:
As we committed to this class, we all knew what we were getting into. The teaching team made sure to scare away anyone who wouldn’t be aware of the workload and challenging aspects of the class.
We all started with an all-in mindset.
However, as we hit the middle of the semester, I’d like to look back on the challenges we have been facing.
Some, we have overcome. Some, we are still working on. And some more will arise, for sure.
That’s exactly why we chose to be on this journey.
1. Adjusting to all the communication channels
Slack, Glidr, Trello, WhatsApp, emails… ah, the flow of emails!
It’s been a journey to find a team-centered balance between all the tools we have at our disposal, to make sure we are as efficient as we can be in communicating.
As we need to reach 10 new interviews a week, we are all drowning under a river of emails, and keeping track of the responses can be a hassle.
As a team, we need to make sure we don’t overlap, distribute the load across all teammates to be efficient, and still make sure we communicate our progress with each other.
We have all experienced that the whole scope of our project can change fast based on a single interview, so it is critical yet hard to keep everyone updated timely.
2. Managing other commitments
Time proves to be a scarce resource, especially since most of us are graduate, full-time students. Other classes can be as demanding as Hacking4Impact, and finding the right balance to allocate the appropriate amount of time and energy to each class.
As an example, Philip from the SWAT Team is finishing off his PhD this year, and he admits it has been hard to juggle between H4I and wrapping up his research work.
“I wish I had taken the class earlier, when I was a 2nd or 3rd year PhD candidate. “—Philip Kang
That’s when leaning on each other has proven extremely important.
For example, in the SWAT Team, we don’t conduct all the interviews together.
Rather, we contact people separately, and are typically 1 or 2 during interviews. We make sure to keep track of who we talk to, and have a shared calendar to visualize that overtime.
It has happened several times that we take over an interview from another teammate, if he/she has other urgent commitments.
3. Conducting the 10 interviews
Want to talk to 10 new experts, researchers, teachers, modelers, government officials every week?
You better send a lot more than 10 emails.
We are lucky to have sponsors who help us get in touch with the right persons, but it is still a challenge to find out who it is interesting to talk to. To get a hold of them. And then schedule the interview timely to hit our weekly target.
So, finding the right time, handling time zone differences, planning ahead for the following weeks, following up with contacts are all challenges we have come across.
4. Processing all the data we get from them
It’s not enough to conduct new 10 interviews a week.
What do you do with the insights and data you get after?
Mentions of other people to talk to, lengthy research papers, articles, contradictory insights… We have gotten better at this, but it was challenging at first to manage the tsunami of information we found ourselves with.
Again, it was critical to work together as a team to find the best system to process all of it, filter — i.e: decide as individuals and as a team — what was relevant and what was not, and communicate that to the rest of the team to make sure we were always on the same page moving forward.
5. Customer Discovery VS Decision Making
Most of the teams found themselves fall in the trap of never-ending customer discovery. We were so focused on validating all of our assumptions that we shied away from taking a decision on what our solutions would actually be.
It was important to get a wake-up call from the teaching about this.
“You are never going to have perfect information. You have to make a decision as a team based on what you know, and own it. It might turn out to be wrong, but at least you will have tried.”—Steve Weinstein
So, that forced us to take the leap and formulate a solution. We are not sure about many components of it, but we all feel we are working on something more tangible that we will confirm or infirm.
The goal is not to develop a solution at all costs.
The goal is to get to the point where we can say with confidence, i.e. based on evidence from our interviews:
Yes, this will work.
Or: No, this won’t.
Sneak pic: what are the challenges faced by the teaching team so far?
This is a new class, so the teaching team sees this as their own Hacking project. They are constantly adjusting, and trying to iterate based on our feedback — sounds familiar?
So, them too are facing some challenges. We’ll write more about this in an upcoming article, but wanted to give you a little trailer from our amazing GSI, Daniel Spokojny.
“The class is being hosted in the Bio Engineering department, so all of the teams have tremendous technical ability. Most teams begin the process with the assumption that there is a technical solution to their challenge.
Through their research and customer discovery, the teams find that often, problems are social or political in nature: a lack of public awareness of the problem, poor coordination between government agencies, or weak lines of communication between citizens and the representatives pushing for change.
Encouraging students to find the nexus between technical and social solutions is both the greatest challenge and greatest reward in facilitating this class”—Daniel Spokojny
