Google Challenge

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I started off on the wrong foot. After dealing with low morals as a result of recruiting three people who weren't going to do anything, I kicked them out a week in. I joined another team because I wasn't going to waste any more time dealing with people with no motivation.

The new team I joined was much better. One of the standards this new team held was that communication was key. And communicate we did: we had meetings every day, 15 minutes minimum. Often it would extend to 30 minutes, and the last sprint was a three-hour grind.

Although it was tempting to jump in with the first "good" idea that pops into my mind, there was no research to back up any part of it in the first place. Starting with research helped us understand what exactly Google wanted from us.

With research comes a mess. With so many sources, it would have been impossible to keep track of all of them, their significance, and not end up with 40 pages of illegible descriptions. Organization was crucial to make sure that we could come up with conclusions from what we found.

It was satisfying to finish the deck and overview video at the last minute right before the deadline. Still, the quality of our work could have benefitted from having more properly managed time, which was a result of starting in a bad team and overestimating how long two weeks were.

May is the month of exams. This meant a good two weeks were dedicated towards APs, not Moonshots... and because everyone's two off weeks were the last two weeks before presentations, it was necessary to cram all of the work in the first two weeks instead. Is it called reverse procrastination?

It's impossible to come up with a good idea from step 1. Some ideas were just silly, and others weren't 10x enough and had already been implemented. Then, ideas started sounding cool, but economically or physically unreasonable. We switched ideas around so much that most of the first two weeks of Moonshots had disappeared. So much for reverse procrastination.

But it paid off. After bouncing budding ideas back and forth, we finally landed on one that made sense, was still hard to implement, but could work to solve a problem in an effective way. The entire trajectory of our Moonshots would've been different if we had chosen a different idea.

Individually, having to juggle APs and working on Moonshots would've been impossible. However, just by setting the standard on getting work done in meetings, we could all contribute our share of energy to complete the Moonshots with a bang.

Needless to say, we had to prioritize getting the deliverables done (all of them!) over making them high-quality due to our limited amount of time. Although quality could've been higher for some of our deliverables (website, article), we still got it done.

We also got into finals for the Moonshots (we beat six other teams in our cohort, and made it to the top 11 teams spanning the globe because our idea was realistic and useful, not to mention cool). This one mattered quite a bit more to our team than the Microsoft finals did.

At Moonshot finals, there was one major flaw that almost everyone had (except for the winner, who bettered everyone else in almost every way): pitching the idea like it was Shark Tank. Especially when presenting a crazy idea to a bunch of smart people who know what technologies you are planning to use, it doesn't make sense to try to pitch the idea. Unfortunately, it's quite natural to do so.