In our introductory week (Week 0), we began working on defining the Problem Statement and outlining our Competitive Analysis. Having a clear Problem Statement was the basis of our entire project, and helped us keep in mind what problem we are exactly trying to solve. The Research team took time to take a look at who would be potential competitors to better understand the market.

In our first sprint (Sprint 1), we continued our Competitive Research (read: Analysis), and more clearly defined who our competitors were based on the client’s needs and requests. We narrowed our competitors down to four companies (Too Good to Go, NextDoor, Buy Nothing, and Olio). These four competitors gave us the range to understand different business models with diverse methods of how they chose to administer food and item sharing. We created our own list of questions that we thought would be helpful to explore when evaluating each company, and strived to identify ways in which Food Distro could fill any gaps. In addition, the whole Food Distro team was trying to figure out whether the platform (not yet decided to be website or app), Food Distro, should begin with a business-to-consumer (B2C) model or consumer-to-consumer (C2C) model. The Research team did a very quick exercise of a SWOT Analysis to identify the themes, gaps, and opportunities that were currently available.

Heading into Sprint 2, we began to prepare a survey to gain a broader and better understanding of the market we want to serve. We wanted to “get a pulse” or “a signal” on the audience to really understand their demographics, what they do on the day to day, and more. We also wanted to have the survey serve as a funnel to gain participants for our in-depth interviews.

In Sprint 3, we launched our survey and went back to update our research plan. We wanted to properly document what we were doing as progressed in our research. We then began to prepare our materials and the logistics for in-depth interviews. Some of the materials and logistics include: creating a consent script, writing e-mail templates, checking team availability to schedule interviews, and more.

For our most recent sprint, Sprint 4, we received some preliminary survey results and began to build our user interview moderator guide around such results. We wanted to build upon our survey results and gain more rich insights through interviews. At the same time, we began ideating what methods we would like to use for survey analysis.