Female Founders Conference application

Please tell us about something you've achieved that you consider an indicator of your ability.

From January to June 2013, I led client application development on a five-person team. We successfully shipped a version one product online and to the Google Play store.

Our team sought to leverage both geolocation and demonstrated user preference (e.g., past attendances, etc.) to provide students with a more effective mean of finding relevant, on-campus events. Preexisting methods relied heavily on mass blasts, which often proved too impersonal and created an overwhelming flow of promotional content from campus groups and departments. Our solution provided a centralized web portal for promoters to place content, and a mobile app for students to receive content catered to what we gathered about them.

This idea was incubated for my senior project at Stanford and is, by far, my most hands-on experience with entrepreneurship to date. It demanded end-to-end vision - from knowledge and rational capture, market awareness, brainstorming, need finding, and rapid prototyping; to agile development, team communication, and incremental documentation.

However, what impressed me the most about the process of shipping something real was my personal development. My four teammates were smart, highly capable men whom I respect, but I learned how to refrain from allowing this respect to diminish my own perceived value on the team. I learned, despite my natural introversion, how to communicate effectively and with authority on behalf of the team.

I have achieved modestly in the past, but I need to keep striving and learning in order to reach my founder dream.

Trello

I grew fond of Trello for organizing workload and assigning responsibility within my five-person team during CS 210, and so I have returned to it for my current project, despite being a team of one this time around.

New board started today!

The CS 210 Experience

CS 210 is...

Software Engineering + Product Management +
Founding a Company + Managing Group Dynamics

CS 210 provides hands-on experience with...

- Knowledge and rational capture
- Market awareness - brainstorming, need finding, and benchmarking
- Rapid prototyping
- Agile development (Scrum framework)
- Readme Driven Development (RDD)
- Distributed source control (Git & Github)
- Issue tracking (Trello)
- Team communication (email & Facebook group)
- Documentation for new employees (Google Drive) + potential customers (blogging)

CS 210 requires from its student teams that they...

- Build team identity (team name, logo, members pic + bio, communication channels, product definition/mission statement)
- Develop and iterate on product ideas aligned with sponsoring company's (SAP) product theme
- Engage in user feedback driven prototyping ("pink bagel" testing)
- Present to company (SAP) liaisons at various product stages (in Palo Alto and on campus)
- Convey how the team would attract desirable new hires ("closing a candidate")
- Formally demo software twice - at the course halfway mark and at the end of the course
- Present to an unaffiliated corporate audience (ShopKick)
- Present to company (SAP) at international headquarters (during spring break in Walldorf, Germany)
- Compose necessary documentation to onboard a new hire efficiently
- Maintain a blog presence throughout product development
- Enter into a contract with company liaisons on what team intends to deliver by course end
- Launch product to a real-world audience

My personal takeaways...

- Just because you like someone doesn't mean you'll like working with them on a long-term basis
- Around The Corner (ATC) would have benefited from more frequent user feedback during development - we developed in a vacuum most of the time
- The ATC team should have elected a media relations manager in its later stages to organize outreach
- User interface design is HUGE
- Having a solid team and product identity promotes team bonding and unity (why t-shirts matter)
- Assigning team roles and responsibilty over particular product aspects is crucial to really getting things done
- Rotating a few key members through the acting role of "CEO" can be effective in managing burnout
(section may be updated in future)

The back story

February 11, 2013:

First small group meeting (SGM) for my CS 210 team. CS 210 (Software Project Experience with Corporate Partners) is a two quarter-long sequence of classes that fulfills the senior project requirement for CS majors at Stanford. My team was sponsored by SAP, a multinational, multi-billion dollar corporation that provides enterprise software solutions, and we called ourselves the "Socially Awesome Penguins" (or "SAPenguins" for short). Cute, right? I came up with that name.



On February 11, we were just coming away from a pretty disappointing reception by a panel of venture capitalists on our first product idea - mobile-to-mobile screen sharing. The VCs (invited by the excellent Jay Borenstein to provide expert opinions to all the project teams in the class) called our concept uninspired and unambitious. They thought we had a lot more potential to do something great.

So in that SGM, we committed as a team to seeking out fresh, new project ideas to present to our corporate liaisons from SAP on February 20. We ditched the screen sharing idea, and we ditched all the other half-baked ideas that screen sharing had beat out over the last month. After a week-and-a-half of intense brainstorming, featuring a couple long and arduous team brainstorming sessions in Old Union, we settled on presenting our liaisons with two new ideas - code-named "SmartSense" and "TechM."

February 20, 2013:

Long story a little bit shorter, SAP liked the "SmartSense" idea better because it tied in with the project theme they had originally given us - letting the mobile device become a proxy for the identity and/or context of a human user. "SmartSense" gradually evolved into "Around the Corner" and became our final project direction - essentially, a mobile application that allows users to observe and utilize the paths along their daily commutes to find new venues they haven't discovered yet, despite passing by these venues all the time, despite them being "around the corner."


"TechM" did not connect to the SAP project theme, and given that they were our financial backers, it was reasonably tossed out without further thought. But "TechM" was my brainchild from the marathon brainstorming sessions, and I still saw great potential in the idea. This senior project class was not to be the right platform for turning this idea into a product, and so I am free pursue it as an individual.

Read more about the vision behind TechM.