Team Vital DeSign
Interdisciplinary group
Our group is very interdisciplinary, as we have quite different backgrounds. Kristine is an industrial Designer with experience as a start-up manager, Maria is a PhD with experience from the medical device industry and Zohaib is a US doctor, who also has a degree in public health and has experience with clinical outcome research. Furthermore, we are very different in our working process, probably because our professional and personal backgrounds are so different. These differences have led to several conversations regarding advantages and challenges in this regard. E.g., we found that deadlines for Maria is a must, while maybe a more fluent thing for Zohaib and Kristine. We found that Kristine needs silence to think and deep dive, while Maria and Zohaib needs to think out loud (maybe a bit too much sometimes). We found that Zohaib works best when having the freedom to plan his own hours, while Maria and Kristine are stricter on the separation of work/life balance. However, despite our differences, we all respected each other enough to view these differences as learning opportunities, and therefore we were always able to solve issues quite easily.
Example of different working process
An example of these differences was the process of preparing our two project pitches. In our first pitch we got started a bit too late (according to Maria) and ended up working until 4 am the night before (over zoom and not having time to practice) the pitch. Second time we tried turning the process around and prepared our slide in good time (maybe TOO good time for Zohaib) and spend the last 2 days practicing. In both cases we ended up with a good result, and Kristine learnt a lot about how both ways have benefits, while Maria and Zohaib had to admit that there are different ways reaching a goal.
Working with needs and solutions
In our group we have worked with 3 different needs, and many different solutions for each need. We are probably the group with the most pivots and we have cast aside a solution to pursue one of our other ideas more than 3 times. This has been highly challenging and very fruitful for our learning process. We have been highly aware not to fall in love with a solution until we validated with the users and completed thorough desk-top research and tried our best to be aware of what we saw and heard in the clinic. Therefore, we also continued to visit the clinic until the very last month of the program and kept finding new experts and new knowledge to ad to our solution space. Doing a pivot and discharging an idea or solution can be frightening when you are in a time limited program like the BMD, however, to control this process Pernille (our team mentor) taught us to park our ideas, instead of killing them. A trick we are very thankful for as our final solution spent 2 months in the parking zone until we realised the twist that was needed to develop it into the product we have today.
Ups and downs
At the BMD there are an endless row of ups and downs, and our group was not spared from any of these. The ups were exiting and we had many laughs and jokes in the days where the project and program was going well. The downs are not fun, however, because we have so different personalities, we never really experienced a time were all of us where down at the same time. We always had one person in the group that kept up the spirit by making jokes, getting coffee, sending weird videos or encouraging text-messages, getting us through the challenges. And if nothing else worked we could always have a glass of wine and do an ideation session, laugh out loud and end up with an amazing crazy new idea.
Status of the CareFold project
The status of our project is that we have decide to continue working on our product. Kristine will be working full time doing product development after the summer holiday and Maria and Zohaib will support the project while working their regular jobs. Going further, we agreed to lean in and trust each other.