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As the product manager on a capstone team of four, I led the development of the aura desk lamp and a brand image for the team, an exercise in industrial design expanded to cover user research, brand management, and designing for mass manufacturing. In the process, I learned about the challenges of coordinating a remote team, attempting to go to market on a short time frame, and crafting a brand identity to engage and inspire potential users.
I built clearr and aura with three other students during the second quarter of my product design capstone amongst the sudden pivot online. aura was a work-from-home-focused desk lamp expanded from a design brief provided to us by the teaching team, while clearr was the brand and long-term vision surrounding it.
During the extended break for classes moving online at the start of the pandemic, I talked with my grassLab teammates, professors, and coaches extensively and decided to take a design brief intended for two students and expanded on the deliverables and scope of the project to match the goals of our four-person team. Rather than practicing our skills in mechanical engineering with some aspects of brand design and business planning, we would fully build out the brand, test and design for optimal lighting, and start following through with our go-to-market strategy.
Once the quarter started, I stepped into a more formal product manager-style role for the project than during grassLab, while other teammates took on the roles of mechanical engineering lead, product design lead, and business development lead. One of the areas I grew most throughout the quarter was distributing responsibilities and estimating completion time. Since each task had several dependencies on others, I quickly learned and leveraged TeamGantt as a tool to coordinate my team virtually, assigning help to the tasks that needed it in the moment and maintaining clear communication to try to keep the project on track and running smoothly. Over the course of the project, I also got better at adjusting teammates’ estimates for how long different objectives would take.
We all worked together on aura in a rushed early development phase to perform initial testing, needfinding, and brainstorming the rough form to match the core functions. That done, we split into an aura/engineering-focused team and an clearr/business/brand-focused team, each with fluid membership based on the needs and goals identified in our meeting at the start of the week. Prioritizing the needs of the two teams was a challenge for me throughout the quarter, especially as certain components dragged out longer than expected, others turned out to be faster, and discussions with our coaches led us to revise our goals.
In addition to the early full-team effort to jumpstart aura, I helped design, test, and integrate the LED lighting system and contributed early on in the structural design and design for mass manufacturing. However, clearr was my main focus outside of managing the team. To shape clearr as a brand, I ran discussions on our values, worked with another teammate to develop our visual identity, and directed user research. We used that base to craft several narratives we could use to advertise clearr as a premium brand with aura as our flagship product in two target markets: new graduates anxious about making a good impression at a distance and community leaders attempting to exude confidence as they navigated the disruption. At different points throughout the process, I brought in teammates whose background would be most useful in solving a problem, shifting the timeline as necessary to accommodate their primary responsibilities. I also helped our business development lead draft financial projections and a go-to-market strategy.
Once we had a clear brand identity, I started implementing our go-to-market strategy and social media pushes, initially through Facebook and LinkedIn given our target demographic. However, we believed that those platforms’ use as a forum to discuss racial inequity following George Floyd’s death made it inappropriate to continue our brand strategy and put it on pause.
We all decided to exit the project at the end of the quarter, having created a high-fidelity working prototype of aura, a well-defined brand identity and marketing strategy, and a five-year business plan should any of us choose to pick it back up at any point in the future.
Returning to this project after several months, things I would have done differently to get more out of the quarter include: