Studence

What was the customer's Problem?

Imagine the future, every high schooler knows what they want to study in college, what professions they want to pursue. Right now, most high schoolers don’t. And it is not easy for them to find a right person who can give a personal advice on finding an appropriate major or college to go to.

What was my Task?

My task was to create a prototype service to solve the problem and to manage running a pilot program to validate the value we deliver. This idea was a startup project to propose and validate a new business idea, officially authroized by Sony R&D. I also pitched this idea with team of 4 members in the Engineering Leadership Professional Program, an academic program at University of California, Berkeley.

What Actions did I take?

I pitchted the idea to the senior management in Sony R&D and got funded to develop the beta service. I worked with a few iOS engineers and outsourcing design agency to prototype different versions to test it out. During the prototyping and pilot phase, my task is to 1. define requirements based on customer's voice, 2. manage development sprint, 3. conduct user test with customers, and 4. grow the service user base. To effectively conduct these tasks, I collaborated with cross-functional team including engineers, designers, marketers, as well as some college student interns.

What was the Result?

I managed a 6-month pilot, then pivoted the value proposition several times based on fail and learn. The most important finding is our main customer was not the one we originally targeted but different stakeholders so we pivited the business model from 2C to 2B.

After the 6-month pilot, our team looked for the business unit that could take over this service to grow the business. We had several options such as running the business in Sony, spin out to a start up compnay, joint-venture opportunity with a partner company, selling our or licensing the technolgy to 3rd parties and so on. We ended up selling our technology to an educational non-profit organization that gave us an accruing proposal. This project became the first R&D project in Sony that exited to an outside company.