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Project 1: Product Specification

This project assignment is worth 200 points.

This homework is to be done as a team.

P1 is due on Gradescope Thursday, February 19, 2026 11:59pm.

Submission

Submit P1 as a PDF file to Gradescope.

If you prepare the response in some other software (like Tex), please export as PDF before submitting. Include your name and Andrew ID at the top of the document.

References

The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick.

Learning Goals

  • Enumerate different local communities and learn about the civic-related problems they experience.
  • Think through the kind of product your team would like to build. Your ideas are binding for the semester, though you will have several opportunities to pivot based on discovery or user feedback.
  • Practice formulating unbiased discovery questions that yield useful data (as opposed to false positives).
  • Practice talking to real people about their pain points.
  • Develop a vision for your company and product.
  • Identify how your product helps solve your customers' problems and predict how much this is worth to them.
  • Prove the viability of your product (before you build it!)
  • Explain the vision of your product in the simplest way possible.

The deliverables below should be somewhat familiar from HW1a and HW1b. However, now you're doing them "for real," trying to hone in on the product your team will be producing for the rest of the semester.

1. Choosing a Focus (20 points)

Our course theme is Technology for Pittsburgh Communities: Designed with the People Who Live Here. Your mission in this class is to create a technology startup company whose goal is to make Pittsburgh a better place to live. However, your startup isn't here to make Pittsburgh a better place for you — we want your technology startup to make Pittsburgh a better place for other Pittsburghers.

The first step is to choose a community of Pittsburgh residents whose problems you feel you are uniquely suited to solve. That's probably a difficult question to answer right now.

Instead, think about the parts of the city you are familiar with. This could be the street that you live on, the transit option you take to get to school, the restaurants you frequent or grocery stores you shop at, the museums and entertainment establishments you visit, the parks you exercise in, or the roads you drive on.

Think about the communities in the city you've gotten to know. This could be your adult friends who live in Pittsburgh, the people who ride the same bus as you, the neighbors who help you shovel your sidewalk, the people who attend the same social clubs or affinity groups, friends from your youth who also moved to Pittsburgh, the residents of the senior citizen center or homeless shelter you volunteer at, the doctors and nurses who work at the hospital you've had the unfortunate need to meet, or the workers who pick up your trash and recycling every week.

What problems do you think people in these parts of the city or in these communities have experienced? Which of those problems do you think you have the background or interest to solve?

  • Write a paragraph or two about the areas and communities that interest you and some problems that may be worth solving.

Warning

Your community must have a real connection to Pittsburgh that distinguishes them from a community that lives somewhere else. You may not choose any community that operates within the CMU campus or any student community from any university in Pittsburgh. We want you to think how you can help Pittsburgh's other communities. Avoid communities that are student-adjacent, for example restaurants that primarily serve Pitt or CMU students on Forbes Ave. or Craig St, or really, any Pittsburgh-based business whose clientele are primarily college students.

Your team may use the community chosen by one of your team members in HW1a. However, the community must conform to the additional constraints above. Run your community idea past your TA before going on to Question 2. They may require you to change your choice of community if it is not sufficiently far enough from your own student experience.

2. User Discovery Questions (10 points)

Reading: The Mom Test: Chapters 1, 2, 3.

Remember two of the three pillars of The Mom Test:

  • Talk about their life instead of your idea.
  • Ask about specifics in the past, instead of generic questions or opinions about the future.

With those pillars and the reading in mind,

  • Create a list of fifteen (15) questions that will help you learn about problems that people are having in your areas and communities of focus. If these come directly from your HW1a submission, please fix any questions that caused you to make nistakes in your HW1a interviews.

3. Interviews (30 points)

Reading: The Mom Test, Chapter 6.

Recall the unbiased discovery you did during HW1a. You're going to collect more data this time, from a broad range of members of your target community. This will help you determine who your target demographic actually is (and thus refine your value proposition). Use your questions from the prior section as a guide, not a script. Ask followup questions to discover what problems your interviewees are having.

You will have 20 or more discovery conversations across your group, with each team member conducting at least two conversations. These conversations should give you valuable data about the problem you're trying to solve; if you haven't been forced to refine your idea, at least slightly, over the course of these conversations, you are likely doing something wrong.

  • Describe where you found each of the 20 (or more) people and how you talked to them (i.e., where were they located, how did you get introduced to them, how did you talk to them (in-person, online, over Zoom, etc.), how long did you talk to them).

  • Identify the five most useful questions you asked.

  • Identify the five most useful pieces of concrete data you collected.

  • Turn in your raw notes, demonstrating that every team member participated in at least two interviews. This could be handwritten or typed notes, transcripts of the recordings of your conversations, pictures of you with your interviewees, etc.

4. User Discovery Summary (20 points)

What problems did people have? How were they solving them? What was not a problem?

  • Write five paragraphs to summarize what you learned from your discovery conversations.
  • Which problem reported by the people you interviewed is most interesting to your team? Why?
  • How can technology can address this problem?

5. Product Idea (30 points)

Every startup needs to explain what it does in the simplest way possible. Instagram is a photo sharing service. Venmo is a payment service for your friends. Reddit is a topic-based discussion board.

Complex explanations usually indicate an overcomplicated idea. If it takes more than one short sentence to explain the concept, you're probably trying to do too much. Simplify the idea and try again!

So, what is your startup all about?

Write two paragraphs to answer the following five (5) questions.

Paragraph 1: (10 points)

  • What is the vision of your technology startup?
  • What problem are you solving? You may choose only one problem to solve, so make it a good one.
  • Which Pittsburgh community experiences this problem?

Paragraph 2: (10 points)

  • What is your solution?
  • Who is your competition?
  • What makes your solution special and distinguishes it from the competition?

6. Value Proposition (20 points)

Recall the template for a good value proposition:

For your target customer who is struggling with problem/pain point, our product is a product category that provides key benefits/gains. Unlike competitors/current solutions, we offer unique differentiator/feature.

Replace each bold, italic entry in the template with specifics from your product idea.

  • Write one value proposition for your product and explain why you chose it.

Note

If one of your team members chose the same community and product idea for HW1a, be sure that this value proposition is updated, informed by your expanded user discovery. Be sure to describe what changed and why.

7. Minimal Viable Product (30 points)

In class, we've discussed several ways to get feedback from users without building an entire application:

  • Concierge MVPs
  • Smokescreen MVPs
  • Paper prototypes
  • ...etc.

Choose which of these makes sense for your startup. Then, build, deploy, and advertise it for at least a week. You can drum up business from people you meet on the street, through flyers spread throughout the city, on social media, etc. Be creative!

After you gather feedback from people, you may want to change your value proposition or the entire idea of the product!

Choose at least one data-gathering approach (e.g., smokescreen MVP) for your startup and describe:

  1. Why you chose it.
  2. What you built (with a link or pictures if relevant; for a smokescreen MVP, for example, please link to the MVP webpage or demo).
  3. How you gathered feedback (e.g., for your smokescreen MVP, where and how did you circulate the link?).
  4. What you learned from the feedback (e.g., did a thousand people view your webpage, while only one signed up for the list? What does that tell you?)
  5. An updated version of your value proposition/product description (question 6), informed by your data gathering. Describe what changed and why.

8. Viability analysis: can you make any money? (20 points)

  1. What evidence do you have that people are willing to pay for your product? (2 paragraphs)
  2. What is your monetization plan? (1+ paragraph)
  3. How will you get your first 10 users? 10,000?
  4. What is your projected revenue across the first 10 users of your application? 50? 100? 1,000? 10,000? (1-2 paragraphs)
  5. What is the value of similar competitors? (1-3 paragraphs)