FIRST POST!

WHO WE ARE?

How to make programmers’ work life happier and thus more productive? This is certainly an important topic in many ICT themed startups as employee happiness has both economic and social impact on the venture. We are satisFactory, seven students from Aalto University, and we are set to solve this issue.

satisFactory’s wheels started to turn rapidly as we had our first brainstorming meeting the Friday 23th before the lecture. We have thus far managed to get to know each other, decide our team’s name, made an awesomely designed logo, publish this blog post and met both our client and a doctorate student who gave us ideas about customer centric development concepts.

Our first focus is understanding the customer and getting as much ideas as possible. Avoin.Systems is a small software company developing and implementing ERP systems. Their way of interacting is quite informal at times and there are other similarities with the traditional “relaxed” startup culture. There are a few small companies working in the same space in different rooms. They do, however, share the same kitchen and a break room. The solution that we are starting to develop could be part of the whole office, not just the Avoin.Systems.

Before the meeting with the customer, we speculated what potential problems there might be in a software design oriented startup. Some of these speculations were confirmed and some falsified during the company visit. We also had prepared quite a lot of questions to keep the conversation rolling for the whole hour. In the meeting with the customer, we observed a few potential problems to tackle on. First is the lack of motivation for individual employees to participate in general upkeep tasks like throwing out the trash or making coffee. Second, the air was quite heavy in the old building with many people in small rooms. Third, the employees easily got quite little exercise during the office day which lowers the alertness.

We have to think a lot what words “fun” and “entertainment” mean in the office context. How, for example, interesting ways to interact or perform tasks can feel entertaining. Social and healthy atmosphere in the workplace is definitely part of “fun” job. Through the right form of fun workers will feel more motivated and be more productive.

We also met with a doctorate student Beatrice Monastero and had a fruitful conversation about what these key concepts of fun and entertainment mean and how we could enhance our brainstorming process. The main topic regarding this was how to start a user-centered product design process. The conversation gave us some ideas how to approach the problem, for example that we should think about the ideas in the customer’s office where the actual solution could be implemented and that we could observe their daily routines and rites.

NEXT STEPS

So how do we proceed? The next steps of the project will be:

• Further analysis on the customer’s problems
• Brainstorming
• Idea development and elimination
• Creating project plan and milestones