Journey with Team Elevate

What I have learned with Team Elevate

We Made it! — Pitch day of Team Elevate

It has been a crazy fifteen weeks. I feel so proud to see how my teammates(Jamie, Jimmy, Tai) and I grew and learned together throughout the semester.

What I learned…

about Our Product

Learning from talking to people. Talk to people almost every week was super helpful for us to understand the group of people and their problems. Since we are designing for seniors which is a sensitive group of people, I learned we need to be very thoughtful about the terms we use when we are talking to them. The best way to validate product concept is to show it to the people, and make them try it!

The spark of ideas is an accumulation of all the effort and thinking. Our team struggle with our product a lot. During the process of building the product, I always question myself: “What is the key value of our product?” Talk with people who are not our direct target user and see how they feel about our product helps a lot. The night when we finally come up with the concept of MVP was refreshing. It was after I heard the experience that a friend of mine going out with her grandparents, all the findings from interviews, researching comes together magically.

As previous CTO, I learned that creating a map is so hard. There are so many aspects to consider about (layout of information, inclusive design, aesthetics, etc…) If to ask me the biggest regret as a CTO, I would say the map was not built convincing enough for me to be senior-friendly.

• give the user enough freedom of how are they going to use the product
• Care about the uniqueness that the product can bring to the user.

And these are the two values we considered a lot in our product Paveline.

By the time I switch role to become a CFO of the team, I was a bit nervous since I didn’t have any experience with financials😅. However, this experience challenged me to discover more potential of myself. Researching the numbers that our competitor was but time-consuming but interesting at the same time. It is interesting to get to know about how different companies went from startup to a well-known enterprise.

about Team Collabroation

There is no good team or bad team as long as everyone tried their best.

• Being nice and avoid conflict is not the way a good team can have. Being straightforward and respect enough to the teammates can increase more productivity and efficiency.
• Self-initiative and independent thinking is an important characteristic that you need to have in team collaboration.
• Trust teammates and supporting each other at any time.
• Embrace ambiguity! If the team struggled with something for a quite a long time, the best solution is to keep going and embrace those uncertainties. At one point, things will reveal and become clear during the process.

about Myself

Overall, starting a startup was a challenge of patience, decision-making, and confidence to me. I really appreciate how the presentation we hold every week in class. It not only helped the team to keep on progress but also enable us to think and express our products better. I cannot say those weekly presentations will make me feel not nervous any more in future presentations, but I have learned so much valuable knowledge of making presentations more engaging and convincing.

Team Elevate — it’s just a start.