Codab

Project Brief

1 in 3 working Americans say they feel pressure to learn new tech-related skills to protect their jobs. - Economic Times

Overall Focus

For this project, the team conceives of a software-based E-Academy startup for flexible introductory python learning. Our service aims to provide learning opportunities for those in the workforce who have no prior experience in python but are interested to learn due to increased market demands.

Through design thinking, service thinking, and the methods and practices used by lean startups, our team designed a new software startup that is economically viable, technically feasible, and desired by customers. We learn to abandon an idea at the correct point in the design process and pivot to a new idea that shows greater promise for creating value.

Gathering the Team

The Initial Pitch

Starting off with working individually, we each envisioned a digital service start-up through ideations and research and pitch it to our classmates in order to convince them to join our team.

Codab originated from one of our team member Andria’s initial pitch to the whole class as a service dedicated to “CODing collABoration”. The idea started from the need to find a substitute for the existing, inefficient monopoly for collaborative coding. Combining the Economical, Social, and Technological factors permitted the discovery of an opportunity gap that could be filled: a synchronous collaborative coding platform.

Research & Opportunity Framing

After a successful initial pitch and achieving the 8th out of 52 pitches on the investment board, the rest of us (Bhavya, Yara, and Claire) decided to firmly invest our time and skills in Codab and formed a team with Andria. We got to know each other's expertise, responsibilities, and goals before diving into the intense 6 weeks of trials and errors.

We initiated the research of existing services and how we plan to be distinctive from existing competitors, as well as target our users. We also reached out to several university students, professors, and working professionals as potential users and interviewed them with a series of compiled questions. This helped us to further develop our project idea.

MVP 1 + User Validations

Previous Findings from Primary Research

Through primary research (user interviews), we discovered that real-time collaborative coding don’t really happen among the working professionals, since they have organized distributions of works through existing softwares. The need for collaborative coding appear more frequently in university student group projects for classes. Thus we decided to focus our user groups on university students, and create a first Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to test our hypothesis.

Making MVP 1

For MVP 1, we didn’t want to restrict ourselves immediately with a digital prototype: we're interested in studying collaboration in-action. Thus, we decided to conduct a physical “working session” with us acting our certain features of the MVP and to physically see how students collaboratively work to solve a coding problem. We recruited and instructed 3 participants and organized an interface on the whiteboard for them to work, and divided responsibilities amongst ourselves before conducting the validation session: Andria the “computer”, Claire the “Codab” interface, Bhavya the video recorder, and Yara the note-taker. During the session, only Claire was interacting directly with the users.

After the session, our questions for the users revolved around two key ideas:
          1. Does the service create value?
          2. Is this something they’re willing to pay for?

MVP 1 User Validation + Findings

Overall, the participants in MVP 1 thought the real-time collaboration coding is more needed by beginners. For coders who are more advanced, this type of hands-on collaboration is less desired. They wondered if Codab could be used in universities for group projects or office hours as well as beginner courses. From here we derived two potential pivots: either develop Codab with the potential to partner with universities or to construct an online programming tutor market space. Both, however, would focus on introductory python classes only.

MVP 2 + Pivot

Making MVP 2

For MVP 2, we decided to choose the first pivot, which is targeting universities as our customers and students as our users. The aim is to partner up with universities for our service to be implemented in classroom settings.

We designed a workspace prototype and created two types of representations. One is a more refined prototype, which we used to conduct customer validations (professors), and we mainly asked them about whether they would implement this in their classes.

The other is a sketch that we used to conduct user validations (students), and we mainly asked them about design composition and usability improvements.

MVP 2 User Validation + Findings

MVP 2 was brought to more target users for feedback, and also presented in the Digital Service Innovation class for professor and peer feedback. However, as the prototype becomes more defined, we started receiving more push-backs from everyone. Not only do target users express their criticism regarding the applicability of this model, professors and peers also didn’t think this service was sufficient enough to be a stand-alone service. They questioned that if collaborative learning is strong enough as a need for innovative monetized service.

With such a strong push-back after presenting our MVP 2, the team felt quite defeated. Since there were less than 3 weeks before the showcase, some members were inclined to push forward with the current idea despite. I disagreed.

Pivoting Before Showcase

Convincing the Team + Deciding Pivot Direction

I strongly believed in the importance of pivoting, especially now discovering our current idea isn't convincing even to our peers. I pushed my team for a 1-hour discussion regarding pivoting. We went back to reflecting about the initial underlying “need” in our proposal.

‍Through discussing our ideas, MVP 1, and MVP 2: we realized out that our fundamental focus is actually education. The need to be educated with programming, and to utilize that knowledge for personal growth, that’s the key focus. Collaborative coding is simply a method that we decided to fixate upon. University students, although learning is essential, they already have lots of tools and opportunities. Then who are the ones who don’t have those tools/opportunities? Perhaps those who graduated a long time ago, and didn’t have a chance to learn to program in college, or even GO to college.

Preparing for Showcase

Everything became clearer after the team pivot discussion: Our service aims to provide learning opportunities for those in the workforce who have no prior experience in python but are interested to learn due to increased market demands. We were brave enough to pivot to a new idea that shows greater promise for creating value.

Due to the lack of time to arrange user interviews, we relied heavily on secondary research and communication skills for the showcase. After researching the competitors on the market, we decided to incorporate the university student body as a valuable source: allowing for student tutors to collaboratively code with working professionals for a mutual learning environment. The service not only promotes skill sharing, but could further extend into networking opportunities.

We created a 1-min video and poster to send to investors before the showcase and also prepared for the pitch/Q&A presentation.

Investor Showcase

Convincing the Team + Deciding Pivot Direction

The investors at the showcase included: Lynsie Campbell, Jim Jen, Jane K Joseph, Tracy Certo, Jeffrey McDaniel, Olivia T. Payne, Robb Myer, Michael Cham, Nadyli Nuñez, James Gillespie, Lisa Khorey, Jonathan Diven.

Seeing some investors personally connect with our service boosted our confidence a lot. Lynsie thinks coding is really intimidating and we said “that’s exactly what we’re trying to tackle! To make it not scary”. In several discussions, such as with Jim, we wished there was more time for discussions and idea developments.

Final Works