Weekly update

14 novembro 2024, 20:07 • António Pedro Dias Alves de Campos

Dear students,

This is the first of a series of weekly emails severing the following purposes:

A.  General notes, updates, and actions to take

B.  Review the theory: What we’ve learned this week

C.  Review the practice: What we’ve done this week

D.  Next practical steps: What is expected to be done next [including what is supposed to be delivered]

Let’s jump into it:

A.01) Practical and Theoretical Classes Attendance: This is a continuous evaluation course, you will be evaluated by what you do, deliver, and present every week. Missing practical classes, i.e., the only real interaction with faculty to share and guide your progress, will negatively impact your work as a group. I kindly ask that all Team members be always present.

A.02) I’ve just uploaded on the course’s webpage under “PDE 2024/2025>PDE Teams” the updated version of the Teams. Under “PDE 2024/2025>PDE Course Material”. I’ve uploaded an Excel file with all the necessary information relative to the course (Including my office hours).

A.03) Please, if you haven’t done so, get in contact with your Teammates and work as a team on the first deliverable, “D1 - Identification of Market Problems & Opportunities”. In Monday’s class, I will tell you exactly what is expected of this deliverable.

B) Yesterday, we learned opportunity identification, the first step of the product development process you should focus on. To understand a problem and identify an opportunity, one should conduct a thorough opportunity identification where you exhaustively define the problem, the route cause of the problem (5 whys!), the associated market pains, the impact of the pains, characterization of your market, identification of the stakeholders and benchmarking your competitors. All these assessments are knowledge sources for you to learn more about the problem and identify the opportunity.

C) Keep developing your opportunities. In the next practical class, you are supposed to bring an extensive list of well-described opportunities, from which we will start screening.