Blog 2: Last Call
We received a lot of useful feedback from both our teachers and mentors when presenting gate 1. We had the chance of meeting with our mentor, Gloria, the night before and running a practice presentation in front of her. She talked a lot about how we showed lots of data, but we needed to talk more about what we learned from this data and concluded from it rather than just showing it. We took this and revised our presentation to better highlight how we used our data to draw conclusions, rather than what our data was. After lots of partner discovery, we decided to narrow our target partners to small restaurants that have food already made to order.
After our presentation for gate 1, Mark brought up a great point about the problem that we identified. Food waste is such a global issue and too big of a problem to solve with one idea, so he told us to narrow it down and be more specific about food waste. We agreed with his comments and have narrowed the problem to surplus food waste in locally owned restaurants. Now that we had a specific market in mind, this gave us a much clearer picture of how we are going to validate our partners. He also brought up to ask the why’s for our problem. Why is food waste a problem, because restaurants overproduce, why do they overproduce, because they lack some sort of system for inventory management. Using this process we can narrow down a more specific problem which would help us create a more fitting solution. Alina mentioned how during our partner discovery, something to note is stores with operational excellence versus customer intimacy and the differences between these stores. We identified stores with operational excellence as bigger chains because they have systems in place for operation across stores. Our focus would be on stores with customer intimacy and having to maintain this was important.
As a team I think we are working together effectively. We meet at least twice a week with one meeting being in person so we can communicate easier. We set up weekly tasks after each meeting and meet online a few days later to reflect on what we learned after these tasks. This worked out well when interviewing restaurants and supermarkets since we could each talk to different places in our neighborhoods, allowing us to gather a lot more customer insight. We met with Elisabeth this weekend and learned a lot more about the restaurant industry and specifically what small restaurants struggle with. We identified that foot traffic has significantly decreased because of Covid, so helping restaurants gain more customers is something else we wanted to focus on besides food waste.
We decided the next steps for our project would be to each go out and interview more local restaurants in the area. We also changed the questions a bit so the people we are interviewing are telling a story and mocking a conversation rather than just listing off scripted questions. We think this method will give us a more in depth perspective of what small restaurants are going through currently. We are also going to ask random people in the street about a time they face issues with a food delivery app and what happened as a result. This would give us more information on our user base and why they would pick our company over current competitors.
