Matt Barnes Week 8 – Organizational Category

I wanted to focus on organizational structure this week because this week many of the core members of the team were able to meet in person and have some in-depth meetings together before the development kicks into another gear. The meetings took place in NYC from Monday to Wednesday, and I was able to sit in on all the meetings except a few on Monday morning.

To give a brief overview of the meetings, Monday comprised of working on solidifying a mission statement, vision statement, and north star for Sunny. This was to further solidify the goals that Sunny is trying to achieve and make it simpler when explaining what Sunny is to other parties. We went through several other brand exercises on Monday as well. On Tuesday, there was some more brand work, but it also transitioned into focusing on what type of content we wanted to deliver to the users of the app, and transitioned to start thinking about the rough demographic users that would be targeted, at least for the first launch. Finally, on the last day, we met with SY, a company that will be helping with the product side of Sunny and later with the company that will be helping with the development. We went over logistics and timelines for both and laying out a roadmap for the coming weeks.

I think these meetings were incredibly helpful for many reasons. Personally, I was able to see the development of mission and vision statements, which I will presumably not be able to see done almost anywhere else. More broadly, it gave me a fantastic insight into the values and norms of the Sunny team and understand why we are all working on this project together.

Most importantly though, I think these meetings allowed the team to become more cohesive and strengthen our collaboration skills. For me at least, sitting in the same room with the others helped me to develop a strong sense of belonging and purpose that we are all working towards the same goal, together, rather than just a scattered group of individuals working on a project together. I think the push to have these meetings in NYC was a great idea and will help the team work together more effectively in the future.