BridgeTech

A product that helps startups manage contractors more effectively from recruiting to the end of the contract.

My Role

Product Lead, responsible for all aspects of the project from ideation to design and driving the team for delivery during the process.

Tools & Methods

  • Storyboardthat, Sketch
  • User Research, Empathy Map, Competition Matrix, Personas, Storyboarding, URD, Mockups

    • Goal

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

    Overview

    This is a product-oriented project that I worked on during my Product Definition & Validation class at Carnegie Mellon. Each team is given a topic as the direction of the product at the beginning of the project, but they can change it as the project goes on based on research data and feedback. At the end of the project, each team will decide whether they want to turn the idea into a product or not based on their research.

    Our Process

    Phase 1. Discovery Interviews

    Our team started with the Job Sharing topic, and we interviewed with 15 people from startups to corporations to understand their pain points in job sharing.

    Based on the feedback, we realized most interviewees/companies are opposed to the job sharing method regardless of the company size. However, over 60% of the interviewees (small and medium size of companies) brought up problems about hiring and using contractors, and therefore, we decide to pivot to a new topic - Contractor Management.

    Phase 2. Understand The Persona

    After the initial discovery interviews, we decided to come up with a solution to solve issues in managing contractors and defined startups as our target users.

    Understand the behaviors of our target users when it comes to working with contractors. Since each startup sometimes defines roles differently, we see the entire company as our target user in this case.

    Using the empathy map and venn diagram helped us to get a better understanding of what our target users are looking for - a tool that is affordable and easy to use for everyone within the startup, and can manage the process from recruiting till the end of the project.

    Phase 3. Define Product Features

    Before defining the features we wanted to build, we first analyzed the current workflow of how startups manage their contractors -

    Based on the feedback collected from target users and our understanding of the workflow, we identified 4 areas for improvements in the current process.

    We came up with 6 features as part of the MVP for our product to improve the efficiency in the 4 areas identified above.

    Phase 3. Competitive Analysis

    We created several versions of Competitive Analysis for this project including Petal Diagram, Competition Matrix, SWOT and so on. We found Competition Matrix to be the most effective one because it helped us to understand where we stood in the market. Here's a simpler version of the matrix -

    As we learned more and more about our competitors in different sectors, we identified 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.

    Phase 4. Validation and Decision

    In the last phase, we interviewed with a few startups with seed - series B funding and contractors that work for startups regularly to validate our product, and here's what we found -

  • Startups are usually more scrappy and opposed to implementing too much process at the workplace, so the tool should be extremely easy for them to implement into their current workflow.
  • Startups have a very limited budget, so pricing is one of the most important criteria to them.
  • Contractors don't necessarily care as much about the tool, because they care more about if it's the right fit and being paid on time.

    • Therefore, our team decided not to move forward with this product at the moment. We felt that we didn't have a strong product-market fit compared with existing competitors, and we wanted to spend more time on defining the features that would be really useful to startups and set us apart.

    Takeaways

  • During the project, we pivoted a few times based on users' feedback. I certainly have come to realize the importance of validating the product idea in the early stage of the product development process.
  • I had the opportunity to use different tools and methods during this processm and I have learned how to modify tools & methods based on our needs.
  • It was 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 stage, adapt to rapid changes, and guide the team towards our goal.
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