During the first semester of my graduate studies in Engineering, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Ryerson University, I realized that students have a lot of issues with team dynamics. After speaking to the classmates about the issues I discovered I wasn’t the only one struggling with this. Eventually, our team decided to choose this problem as our main project and started to build around it. Then, I designed a prototype of a SaaS and named it “Teeem”. We applied for grants and awards and as a result, we won POC funding and Esch Award stages 1 and 2. Using the fund, we hired 4 offshore part-time developers and developed the MVP very rapidly. After testing the MVP in some classes, we tweaked the product based on the customer needs and released version 1 in April 2020.
For this project, I was responsible for designing the product and managing the team of 4 software developers. For designing a relevant product, first, I analyzed the potential customer segments using Miro mind maps.
I also used other tools such as Gantt charts in google sheets to draw the roadmap for the developers and keep everyone on the same page.
We completed secondary market research for about 15 customer segments. Using the decision matrix, we decided to focus on university instructors and deliver our product to them in Fall 2019. As primary market research, my team and I conducted an in-depth survey with about 90 students and over 20 in-person interviews with instructors at the University of Toronto, McMaster University, and Ryerson University. As a result of the research, I designed a prototype with Figma, hired software developers, and started to develop the web app.
We piloted the MVP at two classes at Ryerson University and received valuable feedback. Based on the feedback from instructors and students we finetuned the platform and released the first official version in Spring 2020. We continuously worked on the app to improve its functionality. At this moment, the prototype for version 2 is completed and we are preparing to integrate with Microsoft Teams.
After releasing Version 2 we noticed that for having the users make the most out of the platform and resolving their issues with platform functionality we should add a built-in walkthrough. I designed the tutorial using the Miro app and developers started to develop it.
Another project was to develop a public version of the team formation algorithm that users could use without registering for the platform. This was a marketing decision and before developing it I came up with a user journey map that you can find below:
