Week 22: We’re talking with users again!
Week 22 | Monday November 18 – Friday November 22
It’s pretty surreal to think that we’re rounding out week 22 of 40 embedded with our partners. That’s 55%, whew!
We made serious headway this week:
Talked with 6 travellers and travel arrangers. Mostly focused in the NCR, but some in other provinces as well.
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Made significant headway on organizing an upcoming pilot with a small test group, where we will be prototyping tools to test whether we can improve their travel experience if they had flexibility in where they booked their travel.
Opened the conversation with our comms team about how we can share our prototypes more widely.
Wrapped up the first version of a fully interactive, functional prototype that helps you put together a travel estimate.
Started getting feedback on the prototype to learn whether it satisfies user needs. (Does it help reduce the time to build an estimate? Does it reduce errors in the estimate?)
Got a local Postgres database set up to consolidate some large Excel files, and allow me to run SQL queries (my data bread and butter) on the historic travel data we have.
Developed a first draft of a current-state service blueprint.
Caption: Mike and Andrea discussing the travel estimate prototype.
Alternative caption: A woman with blonde hair and blue jacket stands holding coffee beside man with red jacket sitting in a chair. They are looking at a laptop computer hooked up to a monitor. They are in an office cubicle.
This week was heavily focused on the building and testing portions of our newly minted team slogan:
Learn & Build & Test & Repeat.
As a product manager, I’m stoked that we’re prototyping, seeking data to define success/failure of the prototypes, and getting feedback from real end users which is leading to… what is shaping up as a product backlog!
Another big turning point this week was changing our working style slightly. We’re shifting back to sprints -- but one week sprints! This will allow us to have really short, tight feedback loops from prototyping to getting feedback on it, and shifting direction based on the feedback very quickly before we invest any more time in a bad idea.
–Maddy, Product Manager