Week 1: Introductions, Research, Collaboration

Walking into Made by Many’s SoHo studio on my first day, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I knew that I would be going in as a product management intern, that I would have two co-interns, and that throughout the summer the three of us would be working on a product together. As soon as I arrived with Sherry Wang, a product design intern, and Debbie Ly, a product development intern, everyone in the room came up to us and introduced themselves. HJ, Ian and Christine showed us around the studio and to our desks, which would be our base for working.

We quickly got comfortable in our new environment, with celebratory first-day bagels and lunch with everyone. Most of the first day was spent being introduced to MxM, people in the studio, our roles, our summer project, and the software we would be working with. I took a quick liking to Slack, which the team uses for everything from technical questions to arranging meetings to sharing cool articles to sending GIFs. We also explored the studio — an open space that’s not only well designed and aesthetically pleasing, but also encourages collaboration and conversation. Everyone sits together, which makes working and communicating easier and more enjoyable.

Hard at work.

Some highlights from the first few days

• Meeting with Leslie for an introduction to MxM and the start of our professional development workshops. After explaining to us the history of Made by Many and what it means to be a digital product agency, she began sharing some of her insights on professional excellence with us. As a strong and experienced figure in the tech industry, Leslie had a lot of valuable advice to give us about personal branding, LinkedIn, and being a woman in tech.
• Adam gave us an overview of the design process here at MxM. I was particularly intrigued by MxM’s iterative process and user-oriented focus. He also shared with us some of the best exercises to do while researching and working with clients. It was definitely an eye-opening discussion that changed the way I thought about product design and gave me a lot of ideas for the project that we’ll be working on.
• Chris spoke with us about the tech process at MxM. He stressed the importance of collaboration and communication between the PM, designer and developer when working on products. He also told us about some of the technical tools that MxM uses regularly, which was particularly interesting to me given my background in computer science.
• HJ, Christine and Ian have met with us several times to talk about our project to create a product at the intersection of mental health, artificial intelligence and machine learning. While we were intimidated at first of such a large topic space, they helped us break down the project in more approachable steps and taught us some useful brainstorming exercises to organize our ideas. They also talked us through some of MxM’s past and current projects. It was interesting to see full examples of MxM’s design and development process that Leslie, Adam, and Chris had also talked to us about.

Sherry and Debbie during one of our brainstorming sessions.

Communication is key

The most important lesson I learned in my first week is that communication is crucial for success. With three distinct talent types (designers, developers, and product managers) on each team, discussion between team members is the only way to come up with a product that everyone likes. Further, with three different roles come three different focuses, so compromise is essential. As Chris said,

“There should never be compromise without conversation.”

One way the interns incorporated this into our work so far is that we may do research individually, but we synthesize our discoveries together. We started writing all of our ideas from our research of mental health and AI on post-it notes, then discussing and organizing them into groups to help us understand what exactly make up these topics.

The end of this week leaves us excited about the summer ahead of us. We are still finding more interesting areas within our project space and look forward to investigating them more in depth as we get further along in the process of creating a product.