Through rounds of sketches and debates, our team finally agreed to prototype a functioning text-based AI chat/counseling app for young adults who are going through a hard time in their lives, in 9 weeks. 

At the beginning, our team decided that the project manager role should be rotating so that everyone could learn how to manage projects and apply agile method. However, we soon figured out that it was not effective, and I was encouraged took the project manager role because of my ability to organize projects and manage deadlines. Throughout the 9-weeks project, I have learned:

• Using sprint planning, sprint review, stand up, and retrospective to facilitate the team collaboration process.
• Negotiating and scoping MVP but also allow some flexibilities for changes.
• Aligning team is the key to collaboration because everyone could interpret things differently.
• Setting reasonable expectation and communicate not only in team meetings but also through 1 on 1 check-in.

In retrospective, there are many things that I could have done better as a project manager and as a team member:

• I underestimated the power of my non-verbal language. Sometimes my body language shows what I dislike and I am not aware of it.
• I underestimated the depth of my frustration when things didn’t work or when things were not proceeding as deadline approaches. I shall be more cognizant and find a better way to speak about it and address the issue.
• I didn’t build mechanisms for critical feedback and conflict resolution into our team culture. It seems to me that our team tends to avoid conflicts which accumulate problems or take critical feedback personal which aggravates team dynamics. In the future projects, I will lead the team to better deal with critical feedback and conflicts, and put more effort in facilitating better collaboration and identifying potential conflicts.

Throughout the project, I intended to facilitate more peer learning as we are a team of diverse background and skill sets.  However, the team basically ignored the peer learning aspect of the project as we were all busy finishing our work. In the future, I should find a better way to facilitate learning and actively implement plans to share knowledge with each other.

Here is a self-portray that illustrates what the project turned me into: