Music Journalist
As a member of the fellowship program I worked with multiple teams to explore different aspects of poverty. We spent the first few months of the program thinking interviewing people living in poverty who were affialiated with Blue Ridge to hear their experiences and take notes. This part of the fellowship centered around user research. We used tool called Mural to create stakeholder maps and cluster themes from the user interviews into topics of interest that we could potentially build solutions for.
The second phase of the program consisted of working groups which were about 3-4 people and lead by one of the fellowship members. Every fellow had an opportunity to lead a week long sprint where they would inform their team members about the topic at hand and scout members of the community which they intended to serve so that the team could interview and understand some of the problems impacting that community.
I worked on three teams:
1. Support Groups for trans people of color
2. Resource Support for Returning Citizens
3. Comprehension (Literacy) App for early readers [Leader of this Sprint]
I also worked solo on one project:
1. Food Access [Understanding Mutual Aid Networks and Food Pantries]
The sprints were 1 week long and at the end of each week the team was responsible for creating a prototype for an app that would serve that community, informed by the user research from the week.
The last few months of the sprint were spent working on one project with one team on one of the projects from the weeks prior. We went through a voting process to select the projects that we felt would have the most impact and were able to self select into teams from that point. I worked on RC-Connect a product that would help returning citizens understand what programs and resources currently exist to help them re-integrate back into society. We thought a lot about the social support aspect of the re-integration process.
The Robinhood Foundation donates millions of dollars in grants every year to nonprofit organizations who are doing work to help improve the lives of people living in poverty. I was drawn to the fellowship because of this mission statement and I learned a lot about certain organizations that have used grants from the Robinhood Foundation to improve systems in New York City. I think the most impressive example I came across was that of City Harvest. City Harvest works with restaurants and grocery stores in and around New York City to transport food that would be wasted to local food pantries for free. They operate ~55 trucks that run around the city each day transporting food. They have an entire supply chain and mapping delivery system that allows drivers to optimize their time and create schedules that keep promixate locations in sequence to ensure the drivers have enough time to pick up and drop off all of the food each day. This operation would not be possible without the financial support from Robinhood. Many of the wealthiest people in the city donate large amounts of money to organizations like Robinhood and place them in charge of distributing those funds each year.
In the past I worked on a project which I called comprehension. Comprehenion was a reading system that I designed which would help parents of elementary school students by pulling out themes in books and helping parents explain those themes to their children. I spent a lot of time understanding the reading system that places certain books at a certain age range and I created a database of books which a student at every grade level from K-5 should be able to read and understand on their own.
I created a video where I walked through what a typical read aloud moment could be like in a video which you can watch below:
During the sprint that I led in the fellowship I wanted to learn about literary science and so I interviewed a few people in academis about phonics and phonemes and how exactly a student goes about learning how to read on grade level.
There were many terms and concepts that I was unaware of before I started this research study. This article does a decent job of explaining some of those topics:
- Phonological awareness
- Phonemic awareness
- Names and sounds of letters
I am trained as a engineer and I applied to the program as an engineering fellow. My purpose in the fellowship and on my teams was to advise the other non-engineers of what would be possible to build and how we could potentially build a product given what our goals and user experiences were. We also had product and design fellows who specialized in user experience design and product marketing management. The last aspect of the program involved a type of fellow known as a domain expert. The domain experts had some sort of lived experience that was related to the topic of interest and had deep connections with other people in the community who they were able to reach out to to get more information about the topic or resources that we could use to build the product.
I didn’t assume user interviews would be as complicated as they turned out to be. In the first part of the program I had to re-learn interviewing skills. I learned about how to pay attention to body language and by re-listening to some interviews with the designers on my team I was able to understand how to pull out subtle messaging from what the interviewee said. Those are skills I didn’t think I would use at all.
What technology or tools did I use?
What hurdles did this team face?
We had a lot of trouble selecting groups. When we had to narrow the projects down to just three many people had hurt feelings about their ideas not being selected. Once we got into groups we had to make other difficult decisions about the actual product we intended to build and we did not always agree on an approach. We had some trouble with distributing the workload, if we had to get through two stakeholder maps and two interviews it was difficult to decide who were the appropriate parties to work on what.
There is a follow up program called Catalyst, that all program fellowship teams have the opportunity to apply for. My team applied but was not selected so we decided to work on other projects separaretly.
There was a large google drive full of resources that the Robinhood Foundation provides to all fellows. That was basically a source of truth along with the Mural maps that we created.
| Product Manager | UMG Innovation Challenge | Los Angeles, CA | 2021 |
This project was a part of an innovation challenge. We were grouped into teams generically and we met these people for the first time online.
Most artists earn a significant portion of their income touring and performing. Due to the COVID-19 lockdown many artists were struggling to keep engagement with their fans and Universal Music Group reached out to developers and innovators in their network to try and get ideas around how they could continue to engage.
Duets - the first social content creator platform built to capture human movement and music.
I worked with another product manager a software engineer and two developer advocates who worked on music products in the past.
I didn’t think I would hear from industry professionals at Abbey Road or other higher level execs who would have opinions on the state of social media platforms like tik tok and others. I didn’t realize how much of an impact social media was having on the business of music. Everything changed during and after COVID-19.
We prototyped and the software engineer on the team used javascript to help create the demo. We also use AR-kit a bit.
We didn’t have much time together given everyone had fulltime jobs outside of the project and this was only a two week sprint.
We were introduced to many execs at Abbey Road, they really enjoyed watching our project demo.
In this case I didn’t use any but in the future I would encourage anyone else interested in this type of work to read the Abbey Road Round-Up, it’s a monthly newsletter containing information about the state of music technology.