Paths Converged: Week 6 at Made by Many
What was once a jumbled mess of directions that could go any which way is now a singular path with a visible end goal. Although it still twists and turns, we know where we’re going. Five interviews helped us narrow down three different categories and six different ideas. Our final destination is a sponsorship application based off a rough idea we originally called sponsor shuffle. I’m going to switch up this week’s post and make it more of a straight forward recap.
Round 2 Interviews
We started round 2 interviews with Ground Support Cafe’s owner, Steven. Ground Support is a local coffee shop which makes Steven a target user for the sponsor side of our idea. Steven was the first of a handful of interviewees to signify interest in Sponsor Shuffle over most of our other sketched out ideas.
The following day was jam packed with interviews. We conducted four interviews on five people. Out of our six sketches, Sponsor Shuffle and Use My Space generated the strongest feedback. Use My Space is an AirBnb type venue finder for non-traditional venue spaces. We decided to pursue Sponsor Shuffle integrated with some features of our other sponsor discovery app over Use My Space mostly because of feasibility and demonstrated interest.
Round 2.5 Interviews
We had originally scheduled seven interviews for the week and had two to go by the time we had settled on a singular idea. To avoid wasting our time, as well as our interviewees’ time, Emily whipped up a quick sketch for a revised Sponsor Shuffle. We interviewed our two remaining candidates and both gave some incredibly valuable feedback on features that would increase usability, some of which we hope to eventually integrate into our application.
Sponsor Shuffle Mapping
An almost embarrassing confession as a product manager, I was completely thrown off by our initial mapping of the idea. I’m going to shamefully admit that I had grown attached to certain features. The bare bones strip down was a difficult, but necessary step for me. However, now that we have a version one, each member of the team can finally delve into his/her individual responsibilities.
Billy is going to plan out the back end and maybe dive into some of it. Emily is going to design a virtual version on Keynote or maybe even Marvel. I’m going to look into sponsors that we could pitch to and target users that we could interview further.
Conclusion
Last week was a big one. We closed our a second round of interviews and worked out some of the kinks in our vision. The decisions we made gave us a rough idea of what the end of the road looks like. Now we just have to keep on driving.
