Activities & Cost Reflection

This week was a tough one. Team Saturn was at half it’s staff this week, but that is no excuse for the lack of finesse we had in our presentation. The task for the week was to prove that Planit is a viable product through presenting the cost to revenue ratio. We met early on and established the components and the logic that proved that we were, but the execution in presentation was not there.

Number talk and finances are not the most interesting topics to talk about, (sorry to any accountant-type-readers who feel strongly against this) so we decided that we wanted to make sure to experiment with the visual style of the presentation to make it as engaging possible. I believe that we were on the right track, and the feedback seemed to support that thought, but it just was not complete.

I had spent too much time working on the details of the icons, and underestimated the time that it would take to animate them in a coherent way. I got pulled into the pixel pushing, and hoped that we would be able to finesse the remaining work as a team the morning of.

However, help was not available that morning due to various circumstances, and I had to try and climb out of that solo. When help had arrived, it was already time to hustle. The time that was usually spent rehearsing, was spent placing essential numbers in the keynote. We had relied on the usual break time to complete at least one run through, but the efficiency of previous presentations allotted us the time to push through the remaining presentations before break (yay *panic*).

Because of the lack of rehearsal, and desperately placed components in the slide, the presentation did not go as smoothly as hoped. We had the excuse of missing team members, and having to cover more information than usual — and the critique showed that the class felt our struggle. Audience members kept giving us kudos for being able to present what we did with only half the team, and were gentle with their critique, however it felt too gentle. Despite the lacking negative critiques, I still believe we could have, and should have communicated our viability much better. No matter what chaos goes on behind the scenes, we as founders need to be able to present this information off the top of our heads.