Sometimes, things are not okay. Who’s to blame?
I’ve learned with time that when things go wrong, people have the tendency of trying to blame it on anyone but themselves. Mix that with the feelings of a very anxious person who always thinks bad things are her fault, and get the summary of this (quite confusing) reflection.
Note from future Naomi: I do not, by any means, mean to offend/hurt anyone who worked with me in this project. I’m writing this reflection and narrating the whole process through my point of view as a way to map what happened and think about it, understanding my feelings a bit better. Now that I’ve finished writing it, I have the feeling maybe I was being too dramatic. Or maybe not. It’s as hard as finding culprits.
As much as I love writing and talking about feelings in general, it’s quite tough to express how I feel in the end of this Mini Challenge. I often write reflections feeling tired, but happy with the result. This time it feels just a bit different, and it kinda hurts to express bittersweet feelings. But hey, I gotta be honest. This is a reflection, not a story, afterall.
I was excited in the beginning of this project: meeting new people, working with some that I’d already known, starting a new challenge. It was all great, as we got together, laughed and talked a lot. Everyone was quite open about what they expected from this project and what they wanted to do throughout the process. For me, it was very clear: I wanted to get out of my comfort zone, do something different than what I am used to.
Side note: I usually work as a designer, since it’s my main area. I am kinda tired of it. I am not even remotely close to being a developer, but considering the whole challenge based learning process on the Academy environment I thought it was a great chance for me to learn. I’ve also realized I have the tendency of embracing a “leader/manager” position, trying to organize the flow between groups, tasks, and being the one who presents products in the end. That’s also something I’ve noticed I have to work on: delegating. This is no news for anyone who’s been reading my reflections for a while, and I thought this could be a nice moment to work on these things.
The Idea
We went through many topics for our Big Idea, and ended up choosing pets. Everyone loves pets, right?
We were quite organized as we worked on the Engage and Investigate parts of the CBL process. We brainstormed a lot, used a custom dot-voting to make decisions to ensure no one was ever uncomfortable with any of the decisions we were making, and everyone seemed happy. We ended the Engage process with the following:
It was also at this point (right after the Engage presentation to be more accurate) that I received some important feedback. I always wonder whether I’m being a control freak when working in groups. So, I decided to ask someone for feedback on this, getting to the first thing I learned with this process: I am not great at receiving feedbacks. Listening to someone I really trust and admire giving me an honest opinion on something I wasn’t doing that great was very hard to listen, but it guided me for the next steps of this process: I decided that I did not want to be the one “in charge” in managing our team’s tasks, and did not want to be the main speaker in the next presentations. Both are things that come very naturally for me. I wanted to challenge myself, and also have the opportunity to help other people in getting better at it, if they wanted to.
I then made the decision to stop being the one
So, we split our research on the Investigate stage, using Notion as our guide tool, as well as deciding to have daily meetings to show our individual progress. Everyone seemed happy with what they were researching about. At the same time, I feel like we all started getting a bit lost in the process here. We had a lot of information, but not much to do with it. We then spoke with the mentor in charge of our group, started getting some ideas.
At a point, we thought it was a good one to make an app for monitoring pet health. Then we all started getting kinda bored from it… and then I made a joke-suggestion: what if we made a game? Like a Tamagochi style game?
Even though it was a joke, everyone thought the idea was really cool. I am not really a gaming person, but I started remembering the old-school Nintendogs. We all started going kinda crazy about it, looking at references and planning our app… and then started to realize this idea would be very hard to develop. The Investigate presentation felt a bit like a cold bucket of water right on top of our heads: the target public was unclear, there were many similar products in the market, and no one seemed to know how exactly we could make anything special or at least different with the time and resources we had available.
Even though in the beginning of the Act we were working well together, our communication and group work started going from having fun together to each person working on their own. I guess this started on the end of the Investigate part, perhaps due to the WWDC week, since everyone wanted to watch different workshops, only getting worse as time passed.
Perhaps it was because of our personal lives. Most of us are still university students who were in the end of the semester; another one has a full-time job and was moving to her own house… and I was just a complete mess (as you could already expect, but I’ll spare you the further drama here).
What matters is that we started going through the usual tools for this part of the process, creating personas, user journey maps, benchmarking… and finally, we had an idea. After talking to a Jr. Mentor who resembled a lot one of our personas, we noticed that a common struggle pet tutors have is finding resourceful information about tutoring a pet, especially in an organized way.
Mistakes
One huge mistake we’ve made was totally splitting our tasks for the Act stage. I feel like I could have re-emphasized what my plan was: I did not want to work as a designer, I wanted to learn more about coding… but I ended up working with UI, which is totally in my comfort zone. I admit, in some moments it was a bit of a relief — there was too much going on my own mind, and not having to learn new things and challenge myself much could be better, safer. At this point, perhaps I am the one to blame.
Time started passing, and the lack of communication got even worse. It felt very odd for me, since in all my other experiences in the Academy everyone continued on Discord after the clock hit 5:00PM or even on weekends. I know, not everyone needs to be a workaholic, it’s not even healthy. But I’d be lying if I said that didn’t make me a bit upset. As much as I understood that everyone had their own things to do. I also had other things on my plate and couldn’t always be there. But still, I wanted that rush from the other experiences that I’d had. So, I ask you, reader: whose fault is it? Is it the group’s for leaving while other groups were still working together? Is it mine for not asking people to stay? Or is it, again, mine, for projecting my expectations on my colleagues?
I admit, the screen prototyping was very poor on this project. I hit a point in which I felt there was no time. I was also so frustrated for doing the same thing I always do instead of what I wanted to that I made the decision to start coding instead of planning and designing everything on Figma beforehand.
I have a very weird work/time schedule, especially when I am not okay. So, I ended up working in different hours, usually later than the Academy regular ones.
As a result, I would spend many hours trying to do stuff in parallel with learning how to do them, feel upset to be “alone”, but would not share this with the rest of the group. Looking back now I have absolutely no idea why I did not express how I felt. Making sure everything was fine and everyone was a huge matter to me, but I suppose not when it came to myself.
At a certain point, I talked to one of my group mates, who happened to be a friend of mine about how she was feeling on this challenge. She was quite upset for working only on one thing, which was not what she wanted to do. Haven’t we heard this before somewhere?
So, we decided to reorganize the way we were doing things a little bit. Both her and the other designer got in charge of the UI/UX, so I would focus on coding and learning again. At this point, I felt very happy, since I managed to learn a lot and see my work taking shape. Looking back, I think I got a little too excited here, which caused me to take on much more than I could handle.
I wanted to fix every bug we had, to stay working for hours trying to solve every single issue and, therefore, have more time to develop features for our app. I kept looking for mentor’s assistance the whole time to fix stuff, working later hours without the company of my colleagues. Doing that while seeing many other groups working together made me very upset.
I guess things that drain us are a bit easier to help when someone is feeling the same as we are… kinda like when you get a low grade on a test and it’s sad, but it’s a little less sad if a friend of yours gets a low grade as well. As I said before, for some reason I didn’t really know how to manifest this feeling to the other members of my group. I guess a part of me kept expecting them to realize and just show up. Again, who’s at fault here?
In the end, we were able to deliver an alright project. All features we planned were working, and even had an extra one that would be just there as future plans. The feeling I had at this point was very bittersweet:
I was glad we managed to finish everything and ended up with a cute app, but I was too tired and upset to feel happy. Watching other groups present their work, look thrilled and receive great feedback made me wonder what our project could have been if we had worked in different ways.
Now, finally, if you ask me whose fault it is…
The answer is: I have no idea. I guess a bit everyone, but at the same time no one.
The conclusion that I get from this challenge is that sometimes we just need to accept that things are not as we expect them to be. I could spend my time complaining about our work as a group, about our lack of communication, but I have no idea what led everyone to act the way they did.
I could blame myself for not trying to organize everything, for being upset for us not talking, but at the same time not talking about how I felt. But then again, I just remember how bad I was feeling, and think like maybe I should be a little nicer to instead of trying to place the blame on myself.
Not every project is going to be perfect, not every group will be formed by people who will become our best friends for life, and not every idea is going to lead to an amazing solution. And that’s ok. Not every problem is necessarily someone’s fault. Sometimes it just is what it is.
Going back to this story to answer the questions we were supposed to…
This challenge was not what and how I expected it to be. I had quite high expectations both regarding team work and the final product. Not that it was a bad challenge, but I wanted more.. more communication, more engagement, and a product we were more proud of by the end.
Talking about communication… I consider myself, in general, good at communicating. But this time I did not feel like I expressed my needs well enough. I did say in the beginning what I wanted to do, but I didn't speak up when things didn't feel right, or when I felt like we weren't going the direction we expected. I feel like I should have both talked more and listened more — not only spoken language, but also other ways of communicating.
I believe we just weren't very clear. On day 1 I said I wanted to work with programming, not designing. Then, the control freak-Naomi ran over everything and started wanting to do everything others seemed not to want to do. The decisions we made as a group did not let me do what I wanted to at first, but I don't want to put the whole blame on the team. It was my bad for not making myself more clear.
I have a tendency of trying to organize and manage the groups I work at. This time, I decided not to, and I don't know if because of this or other reasons, but I get the feeling at many points the group was a bit lost. I did, though, take part in important decisions on the project.
This takes me to the most important lessons I've learned during this challenge. First, communication is key. And second, when you know you are good at something, there is probably a reason for that —and you shouldn't run away from it; embrace it instead.
Having said that, other than communicating more clearly, we should also have worked more on our organization as a group. We split into smaller groups and cut the communication we had, especially during the Act. This resulted in members not doing what they wanted to, working in weird schedules and having to do repeated work because we didn't know well when people had already solved certain issues.
Due to all these issues, the end of our project was not exactly as we planned. I get the feeling none of us were trully happy with our outcome and with our group work as a whole. I am not very proud of my work in the team, either. For the next challenge, I'll always keep in mind to make stuff people are always being heard, myself included.
