We’re now well into our journey at the College Decisionator, building the best app we can for high school students! It’s exciting to see how things are actually coming together now. In my first post, I was still not completely sure of how we were going to actually come up with a MVP, or minimum viable product. We didn’t know how exactly to gamify or design the app, or how to use present information to the users of the app, or even what all we should include for the first version of the app. Now, I’m thrilled to say that we have figured out what is going to be in our MVP. This is exciting for us for a number of reasons. First and foremost, we have brought to life (of course, with the help of a fantastic app development team) the many drawings and discussions we have had over the past few weeks. Also, I’m really excited that, come December, we will have an actual product to show for ourselves! This has truly been a rare experience in that not only have we been able to work at a start-up that cares about helping students make such important decisions, we can actually interact with the work we’ve done.
Teamwork is a tenet at any start-up. My work as the Product Manager goes hand-in-hand with the work of our Front End Developer, Josh, so the two of us especially have been closely collaborating through this entire project. The layout and design of this app has been entirely a collaboration, and while each of us have our own focuses in the product, our MVP will only come to fruition because of everyone’s hard work. Anytime we have questions or confusion in our workflow, it’s been amazing having each other to reach out. Working as a team keeps us on track and makes us even more enthusiastic about the work we do.
The importance of teamwork has come up recently in the difficult process of making informative videos for our users on how the college process works. I’ve been researching our topics, such as tuition and student debt, and writing scripts about them. While this has been a difficult undertaking, because of our whole team stepping up and participating in filming the videos, the scripts we have will actually come to life.
As I approach the end of our time working on the College Decisionator, I am sad to leave this incredible team but looking forward to seeing our MVP in action. As we get ready for beta testing our work, I am nervous yet excited to see high-school students interact with our app for the first time!