Payables? Cash Flows? Treasury? Institutional banking? Wait what…..

Written by: Kanika Khosla & Shipra Arora — January 28th 2018

This one hit us like a big, yellow school bus. To quote one of our professors, we “put our hands on our head, shook our head, and said we have no idea what we are doing!” But that’s the beauty of it. Not knowing the domain is half the excitement and challenge of being a designer. It presents a unique opportunity where we get to roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty… or just ideally twirl in our office space.

Did we not introduce ourselves? Apologies. We’re a group of researchers, artists, designers and developers, working towards a masters in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon. This is our second semester into the program, and if you can’t tell we are uber excited!

And yes, you guessed it right, none of us come from a banking background.

After a nice and relaxing Christmas break, we’re back in the grind of things. We’ve hit the ground running with this semester. As part of our masters program, we’re presented with the unique opportunity of being a part of a Capstone project. The Capstone project is a seven-month research and development project with a “real-world” client. It’s considered to be both the most valuable, and most challenging experience of the program. Students get a chance to conduct “valuable user-centered research, iterative designs and product development experience before they step outside of our halls and back into the business world.”

For the next 7 months, the five of us will be partnering with PNC Bank to innovate on a project. Over the last week we’ve dug deeper into the domain, our clients and the scope of the project. We’ve reached a point where we can hold a conversation about institutional banking and the world of banking. There’s definitely a lot of assumptions we’ve formed, not having met our clients yet. We also used the last week to bond as a team, and build a stronger base so we can successfully grow together over the next 7 months. In the spirit of team building we conducted a number of activities; one being a retrospective starfish activity that helped bring everyone on the same page.

For now, we’re back to the drawing board for our client meeting and kickoff.

Till next week,

Team Name (Still figuring this out — we are open to suggestions)