“What do you want to achieve? Where do you want to be in 20 weeks?” legitimate questions from our product owner at Cisco. He seemed to like the fact that we had developed an unconventional method to do user research. But he also posed some interesting questions about the future, the importance of having a long term planning became more clear.
Besides the comments Cisco made, the fact that we presented something tangible to the product owner and our peers made it easier for them to give feedback. We got a lot of useful questions because there was an actual product to be presented. We for instance got some useful comments about the actual implementation of our game based research. And the other teams in Bangalore and Barcelona can actually start helping us with the execution of the research, maybe they could even play the same game in their cities to look for differences and similarities in the results.
Focussed while presenting
Our next step is using our game to uncover people’s attitudes and behaviors towards the life cycle of the smartphone. By doing this we will be able to define a clear problem. Unveiling the attitudes of our future users is an essential step before we start designing and building an actual tool. Ideally this tool will be something that can make people aware about the e-waste problematic, but at the same time is capable of making a real impact (for example by helping people to recycle their devices).
Even though we made a nice start, like our product owner mentioned, it’s important to keep our long term goals in sight. If we really want to make an impact, we can’t start early enough with dreaming up big ideas for an end product, this is why we created a shared document to make it easier to bring our concepts for potential end-products together. Here we have the chance to think freely and creatively about the final station of our project.
To make this even more effective we will start upping our communication with the other countries on Spark (the collaboration tool from Cisco we’re using to keep each other posted). Ideate together, and use each others knowledge to move as one team instead of as separate groups presenting our findings to each other at the end of each sprint.
Okay, that was a lot of serious talk. To end with something a bit lighter, enjoy this image of our team flag:
