Our Location
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
The Project
Senuz – it’s a unified all-in-one cloud environment that helps startup incubators and accelerators in creation, conducting, and managing online acceleration programs. With a clear collaboration tools teams can instantly get feedback from lectors, mentors, and advisers in real-time.
The objective
With Senuz we went to the acceleration program as a startup that helps coaches, advisors, and mentors to manage bookings and consultations calls. But after three months in the batch, we made a pivot to a solution that would be useful not only for mentors but can greatly improve the way accelerators perform.
Ideation
As we have been a part of the acceleration program, we already had a wadge list of issues and tons of insights on how we can refine work proсesses. After interviewing a group of other startups and accelerator’s leaders, we started with brainstorming workshops, where we ideated varied options for every single problem.
Prototyping
The main limitations and paint points were in analytics, teams’ progress checking, and communication areas. So we started with prototyping screens and interface modules dedicated to those specifics points.
Key features
In most cases, the accelerator’s staff kept all the data in a bunch of diverse services, such as CRMs, Docs, Spreadsheets, Dropbox, etc. So it was extremely important to create a single place for holding all the batchas and startups’ info.
In terms of standing communication, both the staff and teams were in the lack of having direct access to the video-conference and planning features. And there was a moment when the power of Zoom and Google Calendar APIs came out to the light.
Every startup-team should be able to manage and update their own profile page, which helped to track project progress and achieve significant milestones. We have implemented standard kanban board, internal messaging system, library section for lecture and video material, and much more useful features.
Main takeaways
To be a startup co-found and main product designer it’s always a challenging call. Dealing with business planning and modeling you never can be sure of your ideas and solutions. Forming a new brand product that the market didn’t have before is not only fun but is very responsible as well.
Customer development and user research were not as straightforward in this case as in other projects I took apart at. Within hours of interviews, and calls we realized that our approach might not be always the same as other people’s.
Whenever you bring some innovations to the world and try to make someone’s life easier, you can face many unexpected obstacles and even the fact that building some solution can cost unreasonably expensive and at the end of the day won’t solve the biggest problems
And even though the fact that product development was frozen at the end of 2018, for me, it was an incredibly great and rewarding experience with lots of fun and great outputs.
