Role
Co-Founder & Product Lead
Time
10/2020 - 10/2021
Team
2 PMs, 3 designers, 6 developers,
5 operations
“Don’t know what I am passionate about” has been a real-world problem for many students. College students can easily get anxious about how to choose their majors and how to develop their career paths. I believe they should not just follow the seemingly popular choices, but instead, they’d better find their true passions.
With this value, I co-founded C-Element, a start-up aspiring to help students explore their career passions by offering immersive job experiences.
It has been a unique entrepreneurial journey from ideating what we could do, to forming a full-fledged team, establishing our core competence, developing products, and shipping them with operations. We have launched C-Element on WeChat in China.
Initiating
It was a process from 0 to 1. In October 2020, three like-minded people chatting in a conference room made up their minds to do something meaningful. Only knowing our passion was to help people explore their passions, we started ideating what products or services we could provide. By then, we concluded that the best way of exploring is by doing.
Since the three founders of us all had computer science background with interests in business, we wanted to turn our specialization in software product into C-Element’s core competence. Building a platform of virtual job simulations is how we decided to do it.
Meanwhile, we recruited 1 designer and 2 developers who were drawn by our passion. From there, C-Element was ready to make its first move.
Trying
Virtual job simulations would help users experience the typical workflow of a job by completing interactive tasks and gain insider views by watching experts’ sharing.
The first role we chose to simulate was Product Manager. I gave a task scenario: the user is a product manager for an instant messaging app, and now he/she is in charge of adding emoji reaction feature in chats. I interviewed the leader at my previous product manager internship for professional insights in areas including:
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What procedures would a PM go through to add the feature?
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What research and frameworks does a PM need to complete essential desktop work?
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Whom does a PM collaborate with?
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How should a PM cope with unexpected problems?
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Exemplary work of PM deliverables
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Explanations and suggestions for how to become a good PM
Homepage for C-Element website introducing our mission & what users can gain from job simulations
Given the professional inputs, we transformed each step of the workflow into an interactive virtual task. For example,
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Conversations by dialogue boxes
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Document writing by dragging and matching
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Competitive analysis by observing and filling tables
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Messaging by prototype clickthrough
To each task, we provided correction and feedback when the user clicks submit. An exemplary work and an insider sharing video became available when the task was completed.
Besides Product Manager, we also created simulations for HR(Recruiter) and Sales Manager roles, and each production went through a similar process from interviewing industrial experts to designing interactive tasks. I formulated detailed task content and created PM mockups for our designer to build off from.
Transitioning
With a demo developed for Product Manager simulation, I conducted usability testing with students from different years and different majors, to test how easily they could perform the tasks and how effective they think the product is to help them explore a job. The results told me that they loved the innovative and interactive approach, but virtual simulations could only provide limited experience.
How could we provide the best experience of exploring by doing? Thrown into reconsideration. We took a brave move to shift everything away from online. Since jobs are meant to be offline in real-life, we pivoted to offer in-person, immersive job experiences hosted by industrial experts.
It was in March 2021, with a team of 2 PMs, 3 designers, 6 developers, and 5 operations working remotely from different parts of China, we made the transition.
Launching
To connect hosts and participants through our platform, I have been leading the product team to build a WeChat mini program for experience gallery and registration plus a website for backstage administration.
We went through:
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Defining product positioning and feature scopes in PRDs
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Researching mini program standards and habits
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Creating UX prototypes for designers’ reference
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Managing development tasks by Gantt charts and Kanban boards
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Organizing weekly sync meetings for updates and discussions
Meanwhile, the operations team worked hard on outreaching to experience hosts and participants. Our MVP launched in April was in the form of WeChat group chats:
2 for user pool (400 members):
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posted articles introducing our mission and experience offerings
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posted discussion topics on how to explore career passions
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directed interested users to add our official account to register and purchase
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advertised new experiences when they came alive
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offered free testing opportunities
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shared customer feedback and reports
More for host connection:
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introduced our mission and program in detail
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provided experience design frameworks
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negotiated prices, schedules, and requirements
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transferred payments
As of August 2021, we have offered 17 experiences (including music producer, restaurant manager, librarian, and psycho counselor) and obtained 30 customers in Shanghai, China.
Growing
C-Element is growing in every aspect.
We are optimizing our mini program to be more user friendly and visually appealing so as to ease the process of viewing and buying. In particular, I bring up UI requirements to our front-end developers and test usability upon completion. A functional product will support C-Element with the registration and payment processes.
The operations team is deploying diverse social platforms to raise our brand awareness. Picture logs, flash sales, live streaming are applied to acquire customers. We foresee future expansions in scope and region of the job experiences that we offer.
C-Element is making continuous effort in spreading the value of – Find your Passion, Fuel your Passion.
C-Element official WeChat account: tanyuansu 探元素
