4th week — back to defining the problem
After taking some steps back last week, our team decided to spend two more weeks on gathering data and defining the actual problem before starting to iterate possible solutions. We decided to go visit Avoin.Systems and, if possible, other software companies as well to further explore the office ecosystems and problems they could have. During this week, we faced some challenges but in the end we made great progress and the week was all in all successful.
These challenges were related to not being able to arrange meetings with companies quickly enough. At the end of last week, we had sent emails to Fast Monkeys and Avoin.Systems to propose different times for meetings. By Tuesday, Avoin.Systems had answered that this week was impossible but next week was better for them. Fast Monkeys hadn’t yet answered us at the time. Fortunately we had been able to gather some data by interviewing one of our team member’s father who works in a software company.
On Tuesday, we had a team meeting to analyse our current data and to decide what to do next. During this meeting, we analysed the data from the interview, explored other ways to gather data besides visiting companies and tried one more time to arrange a visit to Avoin.Systems’ office. Unfortunately we still couldn’t get a visit during this week. Fortunately we were able to arrange a meeting with Fast Monkeys instead and we found other ways to gather data. For example exploring the internet to find theoretical data on common problems in startup offices turned out to be very useful. The Avoin.System’s employee well-being inquiry might also turn out to have useful data so we decided to explore it in detail.
We also decided that even though we couldn’t continue developing the current solutions our pilot client Avoin.Systems has, it would still be very useful to explore their current solutions and interview their regular employees on if the current solution has been useful at all. That would greatly help with defining our problem. We also found some great previously conducted studies on problems startups often have in their offices which is definitely going to be useful in defining our core problem.
The data from interviewing our team member’s father turned out to be not so useful for our project. The person we interviewed works in a much larger company than what our target group consists of. However, even if we didn’t get much info for defining our core problem, we at least learned that the problems startups face are much different than the problems larger companies face and thus we need to define our target group very carefully.
At the end, our week was successful. Even though it was challenging to arrange meetings with companies and the time to define our actual problem is running low, we were able to find alternative ways to collect data and arrange meetings with Fast Monkeys on this friday and Avoin.Systems on next wednesday. At the moment, we think it is possible to have our core problem well defined at the end of next week. After that we will start iterating the possible solutions.
Our next steps?
- Visit Avoin.Systems and Fast Monkeys to gather data
- Explore the current entertainment system Avoin.Systems has and interview regular employees. Also explore blogs and other internet sources on startups and what problems they might have in their offices
- Our core problem should be well defined at the end of next week. After that we can start iterating solutions
