ckpt p1

Author: mlfbrown

docs/project/p1.md

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+# Project 1: Project Specification
+
+## Learning Goals
+
+- Make initial decisions on a team process, and reflect on your experience with the process
+- Define version control and development best practices within the context of a group assignment
+
+## Project Context
+
+You and your team will be spending the rest of the semester building a product prototype for your startup. 
+This assignment is intended to help you build some viable---and not waste your time.
+
+## Main Deliverables
+
+These deliverables should be somewhat familiar from homeworks one and two. Now, you're doing them "for real," trying to hone in on the product you and your group will be producing for the rest of the semester.
+
+### 1. Initial value proposition/product description
+
+### 2. Viability analysis: do people want it?
+
+In these excercises, you'll collect some initial viability data, and make
+a plan for collecting more as you build out your prototype. 
+
+#### 2a. Measure/demonstrate that people want your product *before building anything*
+
+Recall the unbiased discovery you did during HW1. You're going to collect more data this time, **from a broad range of members of your target demographic**. If your target demographic is gymgoers, for example, you should talk to at least a few non-student gymgoers. This will help you determine who your target demographic actually is.
+
+You will have **twenty or more** discovery conversations across your group. These conversations should give you valuable data about the problem you're trying to solve; if you haven't been forced to refine your idea, at least slightly, over the course of these conversations, you are likely doing something wrong.
+
+##### Turn-in instructions (1-2 pages + notes)
+
+Please upload on Gradescope:
+1. Your notes, demonstrating that every group member participated in at least two interviews.
+2. The five most useful questions you asked.
+3. The five most useful pieces of concrete data you collected.
+4. An updated version of your value proposition/product description, informed by your discovery. Describe what changed and why.
+
+#### 2b. Measure/demonstrate that people want your product after building something *minimal*
+
+In class, we've discussed several ways to get feedback from users without building an entire application:
+- Concierge MVPs
+- Smokescreen MVPs
+- Paper prototypes
+- Kickstarter-style campaigns
+- ...etc.
+
+Think about which of these makes sense for your startup.
+
+##### Turn in instructions (1-2 pages)
+
+Choose at least one data-gathering approach for your startup and describe:
+1. Why you chose it.
+2. What you built (with a link or pictures if relevant; for a smokescreen MVP, for example, please link to the MVP webpage or demo).
+3. How you gathered feedback (e.g., for your smokescreen MVP, where did you circulate the link?). 
+4. What you learned from the feedback (e.g., did a thousand people view your webpage, while only one signed up for the list? What does that tell you?)
+5. An updated version of your value proposition/product description, informed by your data gathering. Describe what changed and why. 
+
+#### 2c. Prototype plan: how little can you build and still get valuable feedback?
+
+As you're refining your idea, it's important to figure out what you're going to build (and possibly start building!). For this piece of the milestone, you'll sketch out (a) your first two MVP milestones and (b) how you will get feedback on these milestones from real users.
+
+#### Milestone one (1-2 pages)
+
+1. Describe, at a high level, the feature you are building.
+2. Why is it the right feature to build?
+3. How will you use this feature to collect data about your what your users want?
+4. Describe what you will build in a reasonably low-level technical detail (e.g., what frameworks will you use, what API endpoints will you expose, what UI components will you create, etc).
+
+#### Milestone two (1-2 pages)
+
+1. Describe, at a high level, the feature you are building.
+2. Why is it the right feature to build?
+3. How will you use this feature to collect data about your what your users want?
+4. Describe what you will build in a reasonably low-level technical detail (e.g., what frameworks will you use, what API endpoints will you expose, what UI components will you create, etc).
+
+### 3. Viability analysis: are there reasons not to build it? Can you build it? (1-2 pages total)
+
+#### 3a. Legal risk 
+
+#### 3b. Regulatory risk
+
+#### 3c. Competitor risk 
+
+#### 3d. Technical risk
+
+#### 3e. This-is-a-semester-long-course risk
+
+**Please justify why it is possible to build a prototype product over the course of this semester-long class.** As one anti-example, fabricating new chips for ML workloads is certainly an exciting thing to do, but it's also something you can't do over the next couple months. Avoid such endeavors.
+
+### 4. Viability analysis: could it make money?
+