Pivot, Growth Hacking & Ideation

We had a group meeting on Mon where we found out that we had vastly different ideas of how our product would be like. This was a bit of a shock since we had been on the same page and working towards the same MVP for the mid-assignment submission. However, it turns out that our product manager had been trying to find an angle where our product could bring more value to our users, and that he had a different vision from us.

After some elaboration, we all agreed that his vision would really bring more value to our users, and that we all wanted to go ahead with his idea. We considered the remaining time we had, and decided to try it out.

Firstly, we had to get everyone on the same page again. We took some time to sketch what each of us thought how our product would function and look like. Our mental images turned out almost identical, albeit for some extra features here and there. We then looked at the features we had to churn out: the must-haves and nice-to-haves.

After that, I came up with storyboards and layouts for the new design of the website and got everyone to agree on it. Based on our schedule, I think we can still make it, and we are all happier to create a more useful product. We also learned a lesson to always check if everyone has the same vision, and that we should bring up ideas as and when they occur to us, rather than waiting to a later date and missing out on opportunity.

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We had two interesting talks for our lecture after that: growth hacking and ideation.

I had never heard of growth hacking before Bjorn Lee's talk, but it sounds like a very interesting strategy to try out. I thought that the tips he gave made sense, and it seemed like he had a lot of experience. In particular, the part about posting Google ads to find a connection was funny and provided a great example of thinking out of the box and making use of the tools at hand.

When prof introduced Chris Cai to us, I was anticipating some first-hand examples of godly iOS programming. But alas, it was a talk about ideation. It was pretty much the same as all the previous lectures on ideation I had been to, but I think he executed it quite well.