Sprint 1: The Kickoff

It was an exciting start to our 8 month long capstone project. In these 2 weeks, we deconstructed our brief and had our kickoff meeting with the Interdigital team, our project sponsor. We also bonded as a team, set expectations and connected with our faculty advisors to build a solid foundation for the many months to come.

Getting to know each other

We are lucky to have a vibrant and multi-disciplinary team, with members coming from different backgrounds such as Computer science, Engineering and Design. We are excited to blend our skills and experience, exchange perspectives and come together to build an awesome product or experience for Interdigital. In our first meeting, we started by creating a Team Charter — a document to establish a shared understanding of the project goals, objectives, and deliverables. Other than getting to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and working styles, we found that the charter was effective in helping us to set expectations and collectively define a high level goal of our project.

Deconstructing our brief

Before meeting with our client, we deconstructed our brief and highlighted areas of doubt that we might have. In the beginning, we were intimidated by the number of emerging technologies that were mentioned. As such, we noted them down and did our initial research on each of these and came together as a team to form an interpretation of it.

In the same week, we also had our first faculty advising session. We presented our findings to our faculty advisors Ben Tsai and Auldyn Matthews and clarified our doubts. The meeting was very fruitful, our advisors shared with us their interpretation of the brief given their experience in the field and we managed to clarify many of our doubts with them. We definitely got a better understanding of the goals of the project, and helped us to prepare our Kick-off meeting with our client. We wanted to approach the client meeting with readiness and leave a good first impression.

Client Kick-off meeting

We split our client kick-off into 2 sessions with one being held in sprint 2. Starting off with ice breakers, we introduced ourselves and shared our favorite sci-fi movies to get the ball rolling. To get to know each other on a more personal level, we also played a game of color roulette which helped everyone feel more comfortable and relaxed. This led to a more open and productive communication and established a sense of camaraderie, which can lead to better working relationships between our team, the client and our faculty.

We shared our interpretation of the project’s context, goal and potential deliverables with our client while they shared their expectations and envisionment of the project. In this process, we exchanged ideas and views on emerging technologies and our personal experiences when interacting with it. We were also excited to speculate future technologies and what might 2030 look like. We finished the session outlining our project timeline and set a weekly cadence with our client to keep them updated of our progress.

Following our meeting with our client as well as our faculty mentors, we came together and affinity mapped the concepts, ideas and assumptions derived from our shared understanding and incorporated the insights of the whole team. It was a productive and collaborative exercise that helped us to move forward with confidence and clarity.

Summing up…

Our first sprint was filled with excitement and energy. We were all eager to dive in and hit the ground running. Our productive meetings, brainstorming sessions, and project check-ins laid out a solid foundation for moving forward. It was a great sprint, and we are all looking forward to seeing what the next one brings.

*This project is not intended to contribute to generalizable knowledge and is not human subjects research.