I started creating engineering projects about four years ago now, and in that time I have learned a lot about what it takes to actually make a project come to life. Some things I have learned include how to research things I know nothing about, how to filter and sort through lots of new resources, the importance of a minimum viable product, but probably the most important piece of knowledge I have gained, is that I have so much left to learn.

Last week I saw this last point come into focus. After we presented our deeper dive / MCA projects (ours was on object detection in VR), one of the directors of the program asked us how we defined success for our project. While this struck me as something obvious to have for a project, the only answer I could come up with was just that we had a functioning minimum viable product, but this wasn’t good enough.

I think this is the next of my lessons that I need to learn. Getting a minimum viable product is important, but what are the in between milestones? And as I get better at achieving the MVP phase of my projects, what are the next milestones? With about 2 days left of our project, I found myself not having much to add to our project, as the MVP was finished. But I think we could have achieved more if we had set milestones defining the success of our project.

Defining these “success” milestones not only gives you a better way of demonstrating your work to someone, but also to serve as motivation to you, both showing you where you have come from, and the path you can still pursue if you keep working on the project.

In other news, last week Debra Kumar came in for our luncheon lecture. I thought it was super interesting to hear about her move away from Google and towards a more mission driven non-profit (Wikimedia). In particular, it was super surprising to me to hear how many people were competing for the positions at the non-profit! I guess that just shows that there are a lot of people who want to do good in this world (at least that’s how I’m choosing to view this), and we just need to structure our world to make it easier for those people to do good. We all really appreciated the chat Debra!