The Pilot Project

Vision

Bodega 2.0

Our vision is to give a small independently owned bodega or mini-mart a chance to compete with franchises of huge brands like 7-11 or Dunkin Donuts.

There are many open questions for each team to play around with: What kind of independently owned store? What advantages does the franchise owner get from the parent? Do they help with marketing? Promition? Customer acquisition? Customer retention? Advertising? Web presence? Mobile? How could we do that for the independent? What does the owner most want to help improve their business? How would your company make money? What kinds of customers does the store have? What could you do for those customers to entice them to shop at this store?

Process

For the first 4 weeks of the course we will focused on the “Lean Startup” approach to validating a vision for a project, pivoting as necessary to achieve a product-market fit. We will divide students into groups of 5 or so, and each group will work independently to use the process on the vision for a product described below.

  1. Class is divided into 5-student teams. You are a study group. You will work together to understand the ideas of Lean Startup and apply them to the Pilot Project.

  2. During the first 4 weeks we will rapidly cover the Lean Startup approach and concepts. In that time you will read about half the book.

  3. Each pilot team is required to meet at least 2 hours per week outside of class as a study group to learn from each other and work on group homeworks.

  4. The pilot project will end with a class when each of the teams present their deliverables for the pilot project.

Pilot Project Report

The Pilot Project Report is a team deliverable. It should be a pdf of 4-6 pages jointly written by the whole team.

An excellent report

  • Is clear and specific and allows the reader to distinguish your product from all the other ones. It makes a great overall impression: well organized well written (good English), pleasant to read. It has a logical structure and includes an introduction and a conclusion. Diagrams, images and charts are useful ways to break of the text and make the report easier to digest.

  • Includes a have a high level and very concise description of the product. This needs to be catchy but also descriptive. It’s surprisingly common for a reader to literally not understand the product. The reader must be able to understand what the product does for them, and something about how it will do that. Sometimes another way to look at this is to have an elevator pitch for the product (see: Elevator Pitch). No matter what, there should be a clear description of your product.

  • Discusses the hypotheses that were investigated, their types (customer, problem, etc) and state of validaton. It addresses leap of faith hypotheses, and which ones were validated and which ones failed. It should explore the evidence and include some data from “out of the building” expriments. And it might touch on What tools and techniques were used to validate them, dead ends that were pursued, and a final target list of major product and business features.

  • Describes what MVP(s) were built or ought to be built. Explains how and what hypotheses were targetted for each MVP. And also describes the processes by which the MVPs were used to validate the hypotheses. If there were any pivots, this would be where they would be explained

  • Addresses the characteristics of the market(s) that your product targets and includes a discussion of the growth model (engines of growth.) How will customers find out about it, what ways are there to grow the business?

  • Includes a reflection on the experience: How did your team operate? Were there any conflicts? How well did the LS work for you? What challenges did you have to overcome? And do you think this product would work? Could it make money? Would you invest in it?