Its time for Sprint 2 at Cornell Tech in which we will finally get to kick-start our experiments with our respective teams! Product Studio sprints are 24-Hour period each month during which there are no other classes, so teams can focus their energy on product and business development work for their challenges.
For the second sprint we were given two main tasks. The first was to develop a full de-risking plan. These would be a sequence of experiments that we will run between the second and third sprint. The plan would also allow us to come up with a schedule for running the experiments and the sequence in which will run them. The expectation is that the sequence of experiments will involve building significant components of our product and will lead to something that resembles our desired final product.
The second was to think through all the details of experiment design for all experiments (prototypes, pilots, equivalent experiments etc.). We were all encouraged to be creative and innovative in designing our experiments. The experiments were meant to be rigorous, low-cost and low effort. For each of the experiments we went through a process of defining its objective, the sample size, the metrics as well as the threshold of success. We went through a six—question quality check to help us iterate the experiment as necessary to answer yes to all the questions. Some of the questions included; “Is the sample well-defined?,” “Are the incentives properly aligned?,” and “Do I have at least two treatments?”
And finally, once we have completed these two main steps, we will build! Many teams started building their ideas during the sprint and it was interesting to see the outcome of the experiments. The success and failures of the experiments enabled many of us to see where the wins and losses were and where changes and modifications needed to be made. As a result, depending on the outcome experiments need to be redone. The iterative process of working makes it easier to manage risk since risky pieces are identified and handled during its iteration, encourages flexibility and generates working software quickly and early during the software life-cycle. For instance, some of the experiments included testing hardware accuracy, user experience, scalability and data accuracy amongst others.
As the second design sprint comes to an end, we look forward to seeing where all of the teams might go with their ideas, leading to an exciting series of innovative and ground-breaking products by the end of the semester.