This is where, it all started…
I was in the last year of my graduate studies, I was still trying to figure out what really piqued me and what I wanted to do after my graduation. In that semester, I had taken up a course called Java for smart phone developers, for which we had to come up with an Android application that solved an actual problem that the students in my university faced.
Meeting #1
Our team of three met in a study room and started brainstorming about the problems and pain points we had in the university. Ideas like Food tracker (Obviously), Campus navigation, Quizzing application were all discussed and rejected. Then came the statement from my teammate,
“dude, if only I knew at the beginning of the semester that I had to slog this much for this course….. All these assignments come at the same time”.
We knew at that point that we had hit a real pain point. There was no way for a student to know about effort estimation and project milestones for all the courses that he/she was taking in a semester. So students typically end up taking more credits than the minimum requirement and drop some of the courses in the middle of the year, when things start coming thick and fast.
We took pen & paper and scribbled our initial idea of how the Product would look like.
Meeting #2
In this meeting, we decided to create some wireframes of how the App navigation would look like. Login screen, registration screen, dashboard which shows the timeline, screen to search courses, screen to add and remove courses, individual course details screen were all discussed and designed.
Meeting #3, 4 & 5
In these meetings, we started coding the application, I took up the database design and backend services and my teammate started working on the UI for the timeline. After a few sleepless nights, lot of revisions and a few hiccups we finally had a working prototype of the product, and we called it Courseline.
During these two to three weeks, we had
- identified a pain point
- ideated to come up with an application to solve that problem
- designed the application
- implemented it and gave a user demo
I thoroughly enjoyed the process of creating something to solve a real world problem. Serendipitously I had discovered the discipline that would give me the opportunity to pursue this professionally, and experience this process all over again, and that’s how I got introduced to the amazing field of Product Management.
