How my team and I has stayed on track throughout the week

During this week, we conducted user studies ranging from interviewing Product managers to general Microsoft Excel users to understand how implementing the Excel feature we will be working on during our internship will solve customers’ problems. I never knew that as a Computer Science major, I would ever have to interact with customers about the products I am working on. This week’s tasks were particularly challenging because conducting user interviews is something that my teammates and I had never done before. 

Since we needed to schedule the interviews and prepare the interview questions for all the users, my team devised different ways to stay on track throughout the week-long interviews. First, we divided the interviews into three sections that we divided among the interns on my team, and we had daily stand-up meetings to discuss our progress with our tasks. My first daily stand-up was during my final project in the Cybersecurity course last semester. I liked how it supported dividing and conquering, which is essential in accomplishing complex tasks with various sub-tasks. It seemed like the best way to handle the process of organizing over ten interviews.

We also utilized the outlook calendar to track all our tasks and ensure proper scheduling with break time and time to attend other intern networking events. This was helpful because we could easily see the availability of the project managers we were interviewing without back-and-forth emails asking about their availability. Furthermore, To improve our interviewing skills, we continually asked our mentors for feedback on what we change or improve regarding the interviewing process. Since our mentors had updates progress about our user interviews, they helped us focus on the goals of the user interviews through daily debriefing sessions to talk about lessons we learned from each interview and reflect on how those lessons relate to our project.