Side Hustle Bootcamp 7.0: Week One Experience (PD Team 1)

This week has been a lot more eventful than I thought it would be. My teammates and I are in the Side Hustle portfolio Bootcamp. This means we will be building 4 portfolio items in 4 weeks. Did I hear you say "pressure"? You're right!🥲

According to the structure of the Bootcamp, we will be given weekly tasks and the tasks for each week are to drop on Sunday evenings or Monday mornings. Our task for this week was dropped as early as 6:17 am on Monday.

Take a minute to imagine waking up to this as a newbie in the product design space:

After I read the task, it sounded 'okay', but when I saw the info about the collaboration with the PM team, I thought to myself, "Why? This is the first week, shouldn't we at least get to have a feel of how working with our new teammates will be?"

Drey (our Bootcamp manager) didn't feel this way and went ahead to drop the task like that with his full chest.

Turns out most of my teammates are also newbies😂 and the only person that seems to know a lot more than the rest of us is Amelia (I speak for the entire team when I say, "We love you, Amelia")

Well, despite our 'newbie' status, we dived right into the task. All of us were more than willing to bring our A-game to make the final product look explosive. Things were going well. Scratch that. Things were going GREAT. By Tuesday night-ish, we had completed our survey, begun compiling our reports and even had a really good draft of our UX case study which everyone was editing at places they deemed fit. Let me burst your brain so you know we didn't come here to play. We had also come up with a name for our Food delivery app(ChopNow). Remember, this is Tuesday o. The task was dropped on Monday, this would mean we had fuel, fire, drive and passion. We probably even had an entire generator to go with it.

Then something happened.

Remember the 'collabo' I mentioned earlier? That happened.

Our team lead, Rotimi, had a meeting on Tuesday with the PM teams 1&12 and well, 95% of our work was scrapped like it meant nothing.

'Foodilicious' was chosen as the name for the Food Delivery app, and we were also told that there would be no need for our survey. They claimed they had done all of this already and would give us their reports and analysis to work with. In other words, our job description was to sit down and go with the flow. Hmmm, I can only imagine how Rotimi felt as the only member of PD Team 1 in that meeting, probably overwhelmed, overpowered and swallowed whole (we still love you, Rotimi). Anyways, he came back and gave us the reports of the meeting through the team assistant, Princess.

The PM teams 1&12 after proving that they didn't care about the work we had already done, went ahead to even give us assignments that we were required to submit in the next meeting. The assignments were to:

✅ Design a logo for the food delivery app using the name they had chosen

✅ Choose the brand colors

This is how the team looked after this heart-wrenching report:

Vawulence was boiling inside hot oil at this point.

But, for peace to reign and also so it will not look like we were the ones delaying them, we went ahead with the assignment and had the logo and brand colors ready by the next meeting.

During the meeting on Wednesday evening, a question was asked. But before this, you should know that the PM Team 1 lead was the only one in attendance. Yes!, You guessed right. This was our rare opportunity to finish him the way he and his teammates finished our Team Lead in their meeting. And finish him we did. Lheenda dropped the bomb by using the “Unread Library Effect”.

Socrates will be proud, Lheenda👏

Here's what she asked (paraphrased): "Assuming you are asked, what was the inspiration behind the name, 'Foodilicious', what would you say?"

I believe he was humbled while answering that question because after that he didn't insist on 'Foodilicious' anymore.

Well, we won that round and we were also allowed to use our survey.

Unfortunately, our progress had been seriously punctured and we were left to figure out the way forward. Despite this, we forged ahead, stronger and more determined than ever. Before I could spell, "Jack", our graphics designer (shout out to Roqeebat) had our logo ready, Aishah, (an amazing contributor who always shows up👏) had the information architecture and user flow ready, and our team lead had the low-fi designs ready for our review in time for our meeting on Thursday.

Here's a link to the final product for your viewing pleasure: https://www.figma.com/file/YHSP1XYBHbkZXcGJOUEYcV/Untitled?node-id=58%3A14&t=h7NbkXonkEBBZ5Bk-1

One down, three to go!