Problem
During Summer 2020, I had my first internship as a Business Analyst at RBC. Enthuasiastic about making the most of the opportunity, I jumped at the chance to hop on networking calls with many individuals.
I conducted around 50+ coffee chats with individuals both in and out of RBC, but I eventually came across the issue of keeping in touch with my connections, even if I had a great chat with them.
As a result, I sought to solve my own problem by building a personal networking tracker.
Solution
First, I wanted to put together a team. I brought on my friend Dylan, who was studying Software Engineering at the University of Waterloo and whom I personally felt comfortable working with.
Our solution became “Perlink,” which was a web app that would allow you to remember your conversation history from previous coffee chats as well as remind you to follow up at chosen intervals (e.g. monthly).
As the product manager and business-side co-founder, I determined that the MVP would have certain requirements and metrics to success. I thought that this idea would be effective at solving the problem because it would:
1) increase user’s awareness of the need to touch-point with connections over a longer period of time
2) allow users to stay organized and thus remember key details about their connections
3) provide users with a call to action to check up on their connections
User Research
Through interviews with potential users, it was discovered that the bottleneck faced by users was not the problem of “How do I further my professional connections?” but rather how to make those connections in the first place. Many university students were found to be unaware of how to coffee chat, from initiating one to what to talk about during it.
Result + Learnings
As a result, our team decided to drop the project (in conjunction with the fact that we all had hectic schedules).
Helping others build better connections is still a cause that I’m passionate about, but through this project, I learned to accept that some of my hypotheses will be wrong. Moreover, I learned not to fit my own perception into that of the core user’s experience; I thought that if I faced the problem of following up with existing connections, then other students would probably have a similar problem, but alas, that was not the case.
From this, I have realized the importance of not jumping to conclusions and initiating the development cycle before conducting adequate testing and user research to verify that it is a real problem that users face and care about. I also realized that it is no use to do “product manager stuff” like define metrics, build a roadmap, and determine equity splits if you can’t first understand how your team fits together, how to motivate and grow your team members as individuals and contributors, and how to truly understand user problems.
The full project related materials can be found here. The Figma file can be found here.