Summer Reflections on Made by Many
Throughout the summer, Sherry, Elise and I tackled this challenge:
Create a product to solve a problem at the intersection of mental health and machine learning/artificial intelligence.
This piece is 4 months long overdue, so I can only describe the last few weeks with MxM as:
…So what is the product?
… loose leaf!
Sign up for the iOS beta and get started journaling on the web here (many thanks to Elijah Kim & Sherry taking time to design and build the web application!)
Loose leaf has many different interpretations, from the loose leaf of a journal to loose leaf tea. The idea of something that could be taken piece by piece appealed to the team and I couldn’t think of a better name for our product.
The Engineering Side of Loose Leaf
At the nine week mark, the app did not look too good. It was bare bones, no visual branding, only what was the most necessary — which was the ability to journal.
By the end of week 12, I was proud of how far the product had come. We managed to fit in the most important aspects of the product — journaling and data visualization — by the time the internship was over.
Trusting the Processing
The hardest part about building the product was cutting out features and nuances that would give a more polished product in order to get a MVP. In the weeks we spent interviewing, discussing, and synthesizing, we learned our priorities for our user.
Reiterating Sherry’s piece, core to my experience, here are a few thoughts I took from this summer:
- Empathy. Finding people to interview and interviewing was one of the toughest aspects of the project. But it was a necessary component to figuring out how we could understand our audience.
We are not the users, and learning from people’s experiences and personal stories gave us context into who we were building the product for and why they would use loose leaf. - Decision making. There were many paths we could have taken in order to solve the problem we were given. We went from working on the same tasks at the beginning of the summer to separating into owning our roles as the project progressed. In owning our roles, we had to develop trust in each other’s decision making. For every path we took, there were more decisions to make, but having a strong team and trust in each other made it easier for me to focus on developing and making development decisions.
- Mentorship. This summer would not be possible without the help and guidance of all of MxM. In the beginning of the summer, we had daily standups and meetings with basically all of MxM in order to help us get on the right track. This gave me a sense of investment from the team at MxM, and also made the process of figuring out our product less daunting.
Working and Liking New York
My journey in New York in those past 4 months were full of surprises, some requisite loneliness, and a lot of confidence building as an engineer.
I came into the summer not crazy about New York, and I definitely left dreaming of the day I would go back. Honestly, I attribute a lot of that change in sentiment to Made by Many.
At MxM I was excited to go to work everyday. I knew what problem I wanted to solve, and I felt supported by the intern team and by the staff at MxM.
In school, there is the separation of the weekday and the work/class week where each Monday was when all the things you ignored came back to haunt you and suddenly you were plopped to the beginning of a long tunnel with a faint light at the end. In short, I use to dread Mondays.
By August, being in New York and coming to work was like:
I’m still missing the SoHo office, the cupcakes from Georgetown Cupcakes, and the great people at MxM.
