Duration: 6 Months- (3 Research & Design / 3 Month Development)

Role: Product Strategist
Product Strategists are responsible for crafting long-term product visions and strategies. This involves conducting market research, identifying opportunities, and directing product trajectory to align with business goals. Many hats worn during this project

Project Manger/Researcher/Facilitator/Content Designer/ Visual Designer/ Service Designer

Partners:

Kevin Carr- WANDR Product Design

Steven Rosato Founder & Solutions Architect @ Majisti inc.

• 1 part time Solutions Architect & Lead Developer

• 1 full time Senior Frontend Developer

• 1 full time Senior Backend Developer

Deliverable Designs:

• Research / Workshop Facilitation / Testing

• Service Blueprint- Front Back Office

• MVP of product for launch-featuring both the front end as a statically generated website and the back end for content management that supports a large number of programs and positions.

Tools Used:

• FigJam/Figma Research workshops/ Design/ Wireframes

• JavaScript using TypeScript

• React & Redux Toolkit as the library of choice

• NextJs, framework developed by Vercel

• Chakra UI as the component library that was used to build a custom website based on Figma designs provided by Wandr Studio

• Vercel platform for deployment

• GitLab as the private code repository

• Contentful as the content backend API which also features a UI for content editors

• Finished Service: Student and Faculty- Air Force Research Laboratory

As the Product Strategist for a project at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), I led a six-month initiative focused on transforming engagement within the organization. The project encompassed research, design, and development stages aimed at enhancing service delivery.

The journey began with intensive research using Human-Centered Design methodologies to deeply understand user needs and pain points. Tools like FigJam and Figma were instrumental in translating these insights into practical design solutions, guided by a meticulously planned roadmap.

Simultaneously, I managed a team of internal designers and developers, ensuring seamless collaboration and alignment with project goals. Together, we developed a microsite with advanced front-end and back-end functionalities, employing technologies such as JavaScript, React, and Next.js.

Through strategic leadership and teamwork, we successfully created a transformative engagement platform for AFRL, showcasing our ability to innovate and deliver impactful solutions.

In summary, I spearheaded a structured six-month project at AFRL, beginning with immersive research and utilizing cutting-edge tools to inform design decisions. This groundwork enabled us to develop a robust engagement platform that meets and exceeds user expectations.

As the Product Strategist for a transformative project at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), I led a dynamic team through a 6-month journey aimed at enhancing service delivery. With a multifaceted role encompassing leadership, research, design, and development, I orchestrated a comprehensive approach to revolutionizing engagement within AFRL.

Our endeavor began with immersive research, guided by a Human-Centered Design process, to understand user needs and pain points. Leveraging advanced tools like FigJam and Figma, we translated insights into tangible design solutions while adhering to a meticulously crafted roadmap.

Simultaneously, I managed a team of internal designers and developers, ensuring seamless collaboration and alignment with project goals and timelines. Together, we brought our vision to life by creating a microsite with integrated front and back-end functionalities, utilizing cutting-edge technologies like JavaScript, React, and Next.js.

My strategic leadership, coupled with our team's expertise, culminated in the creation of a transformative engagement platform for AFRL. This project showcases my ability to lead, innovate, and deliver impactful solutions that exceed expectations.

As a Product Strategist, I spearheaded a 6-month project aimed at revolutionizing the engagement experience for students and faculty within the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). This endeavor was meticulously structured, with the first 3 months dedicated to immersive research and design activities, followed by 3 months of rigorous development.

In the initial phase, I embraced a robust Human-Centered Design (HCD) process, placing the needs and experiences of end-users at the forefront. We delved deeply into understanding the diverse personas and their specific pain points within the current engagement landscape at AFRL. Through empathetic interviews, observation sessions, and journey mapping exercises, we uncovered invaluable insights that informed our subsequent design decisions.

To facilitate these research endeavors effectively, we employed a suite of cutting-edge tools. FigJam and Figma emerged as pivotal platforms for conducting research workshops and translating our findings into tangible design solutions. These tools not only facilitated collaborative ideation but also enabled seamless iteration based on real-time feedback from stakeholders.

Furthermore, we utilized advanced prototyping techniques to visualize our concepts and validate them with end-users. By leveraging the dynamic capabilities of Figma, we crafted interactive prototypes that simulated the proposed user journeys, allowing for comprehensive user testing and refinement.

In parallel with our research efforts, we meticulously crafted a Service Blueprint to map out the intricate front and back-office operations of the envisioned engagement platform. This blueprint served as a foundational framework, guiding our development endeavors and ensuring alignment with the overarching product vision.

Transitioning into the development phase, our meticulous research and design groundwork laid a robust foundation for the creation of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Leveraging a sophisticated tech stack comprising JavaScript with TypeScript, React & Redux Toolkit, Next.js, and Chakra UI, we brought our design concepts to life with unparalleled precision and efficiency.

Additionally, we leveraged industry-leading platforms such as Vercel for seamless deployment, GitLab for version control, and Contentful as the content backend API, ensuring optimal performance, scalability, and maintainability of the final product.

In essence, our endeavor was not merely about crafting a product but orchestrating a transformative experience. By adhering to a comprehensive Human-Centered Design process and leveraging state-of-the-art tools, we endeavored to empower students and faculty within AFRL with an engagement platform that not only meets their needs but anticipates and exceeds their expectations.

• Create a single engagement tool, not within the federal system that can support a student /mentor focused platform to be used by 3 out of 20 identified programs. 

• Design wires and prototype to meet minimum expectation to centralize the intern experience on one touch point from the current multiple touch points and steps to apply to multiple intern programs.

• Create a minimum viable product (MVP) or a version of our product, that has enough features to be usable by early customers, who can then provide feedback and testing. Prioitzied for future product development and evoving AFRL site. (October)

• Work with stakeholders to understand product onboarding and buy-in, helping ease of use and adoption, with rollouts that work to better experience while continuing to meet needs. This needs to be a seamless integrative platform within AFRL, that is a Seamless data acquisition (ex: Nasa uses Salesforce)

• Work with users to understand and prioritize process needs and identify opportunities to solution blockers to their goals. This will allow creation of those identified product features for future- developer build and AFRL site growth.

Mentor Email

• Welcome template

• Mentor card

• Standardize Syllabus

• Project Logistics

• Project History, syllabus, team info, calendar, communication links

  STUDENT INTERNSHIP EMAIL
  Pay set up
  Welcome -Intro to Mentor and
  Project History, syllabus, team info, calendar, communication links
  

Why not Wordpress?

The architectural decision behind the need to go with a PERN/MERN stack (here the P/N replaced with Contenful) was based upon the ability to provide a backend UI that is easy to use for anyone at the AFRL organization while being perfectly customizable to the organization’s need. The problem with Wordpress is that we have to bend it to make the initial needs work. Far too many agencies use this platform as the end all be all approach to any sort of Rapid Application Development. The approach of using a SaaS for the backend comes from the JamStack mentality of focusing on the customization of the front end while delegating complexity of creating a feature-rich backend to external providers that specialize in the field. Doing this skips the possibility of creating a Frankeisten platform that users have a hard time to use.

In our case, we carefully curated a list of contenders before choosing Contenful. You can consult the following table in order to understand what were the key features that we use to determine which platform to use.

Some more reasons:

• More powerful editing tools and customization of content taxonomy through the Contentful backend

• Custom tailored design that closely follows Figma designs created by professional designers. No need to customize a Wordpress theme

• Easier to scale and deploy

• Data Centric. Stronger control over how content is being displayed on the website in order to minimize the fact that editors could make the website derail from its intended visual alignment (with Wordpress you use page builders, whereas this chosen structure is data centric)

• Extensibility. Ability to expand upon the MVP in order to integrate a student/mentor portal. Whether in the form of a third party or going full custom tailored solution.

Infrastructure & Deployment

The choice of deployment for this MVP handout was made in favor of ease of use, while keeping in mind security.

Instead of going overboard with the very mainstream way of using AWS and Terraform to deploy a static website at scale, we went one level higher, by using the Vercel platform. Vercel allows us the following benefits:

• Continuous Delivery & Continuous Deployment

• Every branch a developer creates will create a preview environment that can be shared with stakeholders. Making the feedback loop cycle very fast

• Merging changes to the main branches will automatically release the website into production

• Vercel manages the complexity of SSL certificates, domain management, content distribution through a CDN, usage of edge functions and much more. This gives us a website that is delivered across the globe in an automated way, without having to maintain the whole infrastructure behind.

• Vercel still uses AWS behind, but we do not have to manage it through Cloud formation, AWS Amplify and whatnot. Therefore it limits the need to hire full time dev-ops just to manage a statically generated website

Vercel does have its limitations. But we evaluated that AFRL would not need to worry about such limitations and even if they hit them, the pricing structure of Vercel will not break the bank. See more details on their pricing limitations here.

Publishing Strategy

Creating a website that is very fast for users comes with its challenges. For example, if we use Wordpress, it uses PHP as the runtime and scaling wordpress websites becomes a challenge. 

It then comes to our mind the question of: How we can release a static website, without having developers maintain tedious copy pasted HTML pages using legacy software or worse, having to spend the majority of the development on optimizing its content distribution across the globe.

The answer lies in the JamStack approach where we use React to create a dynamic enough site that developers are able to develop on, while statically generating the website at build time.

Known Issues

• Performance when filtering

• There is a slight performance issue when we start filtering. There is also no loading state on the search capabilities which would make everything smoother. It is something we were aware but had to postpone to next phase in favor of incorporating customer feedback

• Image optimization using NextJs and Vercel across all devices

• Right now if we put big images on contentful, they will not be optimized. We should leverage next/image (from NextJs) to optimize images on demand through their network