Reflection: MVP Validation & Onward

Team Progress

This week is all about compiling all the work that we have done together into assessment presentation. It was a summary of work thus far and our ideas were coming together from our research validation. We were able to present our topic well to our class learning from our past mistakes. Some key highlights from our business are our BMC, Target Market and our research validation. We were able to be more detailed BMC by creating a concept map that helped in idea generation. It was easier to draw this out on paper, finding connections and grouping like items together.

Detailed BMC generated from a Concept Map

We were able to find more targeted numbers for our target market by finding more data for the number of people aged 25–35 that earn 100k+.

Target User Groupings, aged 25–35 who earn 100k+

MVP Validation

Our MVP validation test was a success, testing out a low-fi prototype and confirming the expected behavior. We created this card to send to participants to record their responses and the results were very promising. I had a vision on how this would look and I designed the experiment. Initially there was back and fourth on how this would look causing confusion to the team. I quickly defended my idea and combined elements of the level of concern to represent them to the team. If you believe in something, you need to work double time to make others believe it too. In this situation, I took everyones concerns and addressed them in a clear drawing on scratch paper, representing the options as clear design choices. From this, my team was able to move forward with the design and then conducted the experiment. As a low-fi experiment, it was really effective.

Image from our MVP testing

Going Forward

In the beginning, we wanted our product to solve the initial problem of organizing eating out with friends. But now, our idea is naturally blossoming into bigger elements. After our MVP validation we are thinking that we combine elements of social media and crowdsourcing information for our product. I think it was a great tool to use a Comparative landscape vs a competitive analysis. The insight that I gained from this was that we are not trying to compete with any current model, we want to get into a new market as a new service. Thinking about our product in a comparative landscape, shaped our ideas about our identity from learning what was great about other businesses that are the same but different. We are sprinting forward with design while keeping the user apart of our process at every step. Keeping user involvement as our design continues forward gives confidence in everything that we do.

Our Product Roadmap

New Responsibilities

My current role on the team is the CMO. I believe I will do well in this role because of my experience in customer service and my ability to talk to people. Although the initial idea of our project is my concept, the role of the CEO went to a teammate who is better at leading the current team. My responsibilities this semester is causing me to have limited resources and the role of the team leader should go to who is performing the best. Team synergy is important for overall product development. Like in cooking, missteps during the preparation, freshness of the ingredients and time spent on the given process affect the results.

Our current plan is building a fake door web page that is both for customers and restaurant owners. There, we can start to measure how many users we can keep and start getting real customer data. We plan to get data analytics for our user-facing page and count the number of sign-ups for our list restaurants. Our customer funnel is still in development and we will have a better version of it later.