My Role

Product Lead, responsible for all aspects of the project and leading the team during the process.

Tools & Methods

Storyboardthat, Sketch

User Research, Fishbone analysis, Competition Matrix, Personas, Storyboarding, URD, Mockups

Goal

Find a solution to solve a problem in HR/Recruiting and validate it with users.

Our Process

Milestone 1: Discovery Interviews

What we did

For this iteration, we were initially given the Job Sharing topic to focus on for this project.

Interviewed with 15 users ranging from CEOs, recruiters, HR managers, employees of both large corporations and startups to students and contractors.

Identified 7 different ideas and chose one problem statement that has more growth potential.

What we learned

After the discovery interviews, users mentioned different pain points in recruiting/HR ranging from difficulties in hiring internationals, challenges when managing contractors, getting back into the job market after a break, etc.

We realized most interviewees/companies regardless of the company size are opposed to the job sharing method.

Then we decided to pivot and select the contractor management problem to focus on because about 50% of the interviewees (small and medium size of companies) reflect the same problem during our discovery interviews , and we have more access to target users in the Bay Area, which would be helpful to us for the validation process later.

Milestone 2: Solution & Personas

What we did

Used the Fishbone diagram to conduct the Root Cause analysis on the selected idea.

Came up with a potential solution BridgeTech to solve the selected problem - help startups hire and manage contractors more effectively.

Crafted two personas that fit as the target users of the potential solution, and one represents Contractors and the other represents Startups.

What we learned

From the company's standpoint, it seemed that sometimes contractors' deliverables were different or lower than the expectation. Therefore, companies wasted the resources on recruiting and paying them, but failed to get what they needed from the contractors.

One of the problems with using contractors is that some companies have a much simpler process for hiring contractors, which led to the low quality of deliverables in the later stage.

Another pain point is that companies don't have a comprehensive project management process in place to work with contractors efficiently. Sometimes it's unclear to the contractors what the company is looking for in a deliverable, and then with more inefficient communication, the deliverable turns out to be something different than what the company has in mind.

After further analysis, we decided to focus on contractor management for only engineering and design roles at tech companies for this project instead, because most smaller companies only hire contractors for additional help in these fields, and the solution will be more valuable to them when hiring this type of contractors.

Milestone 3: Use cases

What we did

Identified 5 use cases for the contractor management solution - Interview Design, Interview Scheduling, Project Design, Communication System and Analytics Reports.

Created Storyboards to describe the user journey.

Created Product Requirements Documents for the purpose of development.

What we learned

Based on the feedback, it's always good to include at least one alternative flow for the user journey for the same use case to fully consider all possible scenarios.

Personally, I found it extremely critical to identify the action points in each flow when using storyboarding to describe the user journey.

Milestone 4: Competitive Analysis

What we did

Created a Petal Diagram to analyze our main competitors.

Created a Competition Matrix (a modified version based on our project's needs) to identify what our main competitors are.

What we learned

We spent a lot of time on researching on all the companies that might share similar features with our solution and created 4 different versions (only 2 versions were presented above).

As we learned more and more about our competitors in different sectors, we narrowed down to Lystable and WorkMarket as our key competitors.

While there might be still room for BridgeTech to grow, we realized the competition is very fierce in this domain.

Milestone 5: Validations & Our Decision

What we did

Interviewed with 2 CEOs of startups and 3 contractors.

Made a decision on conducting more research on this idea (the decision was required at the end of the class and it could be Yes, No or More Research).

What we learned

According to one of the CEOs we interviewed with, startups are usually more scrappy and opposed to implementing too much process at the workplace, so it could be challenging to convince startups to get on board and implement BridgeTech.

Contractors mention sometimes they have bigger problems to worry about such as if they work for the right client (when they can choose) or they can receive payment on time, so BridgeTech doesn't solve their biggest pain point.

Therefore, even though it seems that there's a problem with the way startups manage contractors, we felt like we needed to spend more time on researching and further validating our solution with target users.

Takeaways

Key Learnings

During the project, we conducted a few rounds of user interviews with target users and pivoted a few times based on the feedback. I certainly have come to understand the importance of validating the idea in the early stage of the product development process.

I had the opportunity to use different tools and methods during this process such as storyboards, PRD, Fishbone diagram and the Petal diagram. It helped me to understand what tools/methods I should use and how to modify them based on our needs.

It was also a great opportunity for me to be the Product Lead on this project, because it helped me to significantly improve my leadership skills on how to manage team members' differences, prioritize our tasks for the team during each iteration, adjust to changes during the process, and guidethe team towards our goal.

Next Steps

Personally I plan to select a few use cases and create mockups of the features as my personal design project, so stay tuned!