Context & Problem

Scope had just increased following MVP release and clarified audience expectations

Once the first public MVP was released, our public audience gave clear feedback that they had expectations of core feature parity for products in the Android Launcher product category. That meant a launcher, aka homescreen, had to provide polish and features we didn't yet have in MVP to keep it lean.

See “Commercialization” case study for more info.

No additional outside funding meant no additional resources to scale production

I'd pitched venture capital based on the recent pilot study findings prior to MVP development, with varying appetite (see “Pilot Study” case study for more info on study findings). Following MVP release, I knew nothing about out value proposition had changed from an investor perspective.

Partnering with Carnegie Mellon's Swartz Center acted as our link to prospective interns, who provided the skills needed to scale

Many recent masters graduates were looking to build their resumes. Between that, and new grads finding Anew's mission meaningful and exciting, I received a steady stream of applications for various roles.

CMU TEPPER QUAD, CONTAINING ANEW OFFICES PROVIDED BY THE SWARTZ CENTER

As Anew was still refining its market fit, supplementary research running in parallel to development would help de-risk bets.

Internships were leveraged in two ways. First, to provide us better clarity on users and the market, to more deeply understand how we could deliver value. And second, to product technical proof-of-concepts for features I had limited bandwidth for, thus expediting production.

Strategy & Leadership Approach

My leadership philosophy is to set clear goals and targets, and enable and support interns to decide how to best tackle problems.

I am against micromanaging. Rather, I look to find people with passion and strong self-governance, and assist them as they need. Some interns need more support, especially when tackling new areas and challenges. Others drive ahead full speed, so just checking in and ensuring alignment in targets and goals is all they need.

Getting the best work out of someone requires understanding their interests, goals, constraints, and disposition.

For all interns, I aim to establish a few key areas of understanding:

• What are they excited about and interested in?

• Where do they want to grow?

• How long would they like their internship to be?

• What deliverable would they like to be able to show in their portfolio at the end?

By understanding how to provide them value for their work, they had clear incentives to do their best. Not only would their contributions help our efforts, they would also grow in areas of their interests, have tangible accomplishments demonstrating that, and be more competitive in the hiring marketplace after the experience.

Interns understanding how they personally benefit from the work is crucial to motivate them to deliver and do their best. They understand they're doing this for themselves as much as they are for the company.

To reduce ramp-up time and align interns quickly, I distilled pilot research into a clear persona representing our core user.

This let new contributors immediately understand user needs without wading through years of raw research, ensuring their projects stayed grounded in real user problems.

ANEW TARGET USER PERSONA BASED ON PILOT

The intern team operated on a hybrid model, meeting in person once a week, and working flexibly remotely otherwise.

Meeting weekly at our campus office allowed us a chance to review progress together, and have in-person 1-on-1s for individual problem solving, check-ins, and support.

This provided a good balance for focused heads-down work at home, while allowing for chatting with other team members and building more comfortable communication and relationships.

Exploration Themes & Outcomes

Brand guidelines expedited high fidelity design, and enabled UX and marketing consistency.

The first intern to join the team, Weiyi had never done any work creating a style guide, brand, or color palette. When I asked her where she would like to grow, she indicated she'd love to learn about brand.

Taking my experience working on a team establishing brand and UX guidelines for a financial firm, I mentored Weiyi in how to create a brand. How should our brand feel? What tone of voice should we use? How do fonts, colors, and imagery reassert that feeling?

With initial guidelines on how to define a brand, Weiyi dug in for over a month experimenting and developing brand guidelines. We'd check in frequently, but I encouraged her to own this task. I gave my opinion on what the product and brand represented to me, and how that could feel, but left her to decide how to define it.

SAMPLES OF WEIYI'S BRAND ASSETS

She did positively brilliant work, and as a result she went on to lead brand design at DataBento, a fintech firm. After never doing any brand work before, she excelled in a whole new direction.

The guidelines she produced expedited production tremendously, and enabled consistency across product and marketing voice and visual assets.

Market validation and exploration identified a promising market in parental assistance software.

Many times during venture capital events and showcases I'd hear, “I love the idea of your company's product, have you thought about making a version for parents and kids?”

When Kanika applied for an internship, she was immediately interested in exploratory research of a version of Anew that allowed parents to ensure their child's developmental health. This version would aim to leverage our existing feature set, adapted to a parent-child dynamic.

Over the course of 9 months, Kanika conducted exploratory interviews, distilled findings, executed a comprehensive low-fidelity version of the product to test, conducted follow-up user tests with potential solution design options, and created a final report. The report outlined the needs of parents, what design solutions were effective for what purposes, and how that would translate to better outcomes for both the parents and children.

Most significant findings included customer needs and appetite. Parents were willing to pay $20-$50/mo based on Kanika's interviews and surveys, based on the features users identified as most valuable. This is a ~10x increase over standard Anew user value estimated $3-$5/mo during our market research.

Recommendations, personalization, and the data to provide these types of features in Anew excited users and advisors.

Taru's research on recommendation systems helped push forward our design of recommendations in Anew. Yuechen set the foundation for these recommendation systems by researching and creating technical proof-of-concepts on the Android OS, allowing us to access and organize user usage data.

Yuechen's proof of concept cut 4-6 weeks of engineering investigation and prototyping functionality.

This work helped to de-risk recommendation system design.

Career development helped interns grow into their next roles

Other interns used the experience as stepping stones their next career stage. Yee Kit enjoyed the HCI process so much, she joined CMU's HCII program after her internship. Yukta went onward with data science to assist American Eagle in their recommendation systems. And Junqi took his product management experience assisting me, to manage BMW vehicle production.

Impact & Reflection

Intern projects multiplied my own bandwidth, helping validate research and speed up production.

Months were shaved off of production timelines based on the interns' impacts, and encouraging avenues for monetization were identified adjacent to our core value proposition.

They surfaced pricing and market insights, proved engineering functionality, expedited design, and validated previously riskier areas of research.

After their internships, they're now making a difference across industries.

Global industry leaders are now enjoying the care and talent of previous Anew interns, and I couldn't be happier.

A FEW COMPANIES EMPLOYING ANEW'S PREVIOUS INTERNS

As a leader, the experience hosting interns provided several valuable areas of growth.

This experience provided numerous new professional experiences:

• Creating roles that aligned contributor passion, with critical objectives.

• Greater experience leading widely varying personality types, and catering my approach.

• Enabling autonomy, while understanding individual needs for support.

• Navigating contributor shortcomings, and helping them grow or change focus.

This experience reinforced my belief that designer leaders can multiply their team's effectiveness. Not just by providing design solutions, but by creating the structures, incentives, and direction that let others contribute meaningfully. My goal wasn't to force growth, but to align how interns wanted to grow, with opportunities that benefitted producing Anew.