This week was a busy one for my fellow yentas and me. After spending countless hours together throwing out fabulous ideas and cementing our vision last week, it was now time for our three workstreams to, well, get cracking. The marketing and MVP teams worked together to facilitate our first customer interactions (!) while the tech/operations team drew out a usability roadmap for our product. As you can see, we really had to put on our thinking caps for that one.
I have no prior experience in anything remotely like this, so working with two teammates to map out the user’s journey through our product was one of the highlights of my FIELD experience thus far. Spelling out every step of the process in detail forced us to reevaluate our thinking, clearly define our goals and confront some challenges we hadn’t expected. For example, was the purpose of our site to create matches or to create dates? This may seem like the same thing, but from a functionality standpoint, allowing “yentas” (matchmakers) to set up two friends, versus creating tools to facilitate the real-world meeting of those two people, are two related yet very different products. We’d like to offer both, since we believe that’s where we can truly add value both for the yentas and the “daters,” but the time and monetary constraints of the FIELD curriculum may force us to choose. Accordingly, we decided to place more emphasis on creating the match, treating the actual occurrence of the date as a customer retention/loyalty tactic for now rather than a necessary component of yenta-friend’s first phase.
It’s tough decisions like these that keep the process exciting. None of us like having to cut down features or think realistically about the many constraints we face (HBS students can do anything, obvi), but these mini-dilemmas lead to more brainstorming, innovation and iteration.
Next time, I’ll fill you in on key learnings from our customer interactions and how this will inform our product design. Scintillating, eh? Until then, if you’ve got a fabulous single friend you’d like to set up, we want to hear from you at yentafriend@gmail.com.
