Build for Good post-finale

Before going to bed and getting much needed rest, let me write some of my initial retrospective.

It has been less than half a day since the hackathon has ended, we’re about to see the winning teams appear on the news! Other than winning teams who will be appearing on media, we have one non winning team who also made it through.

Considering the teams that won, the problem spaces, the type of solutions, there seems to be less overlap and a lot of consideration going into picking the “top 3”.

Student teams generally do well due to the sheer ability to crank through but not every student team has managed to pull through a compelling problem and solution space. Also, not every problem is made equal!

The winning teams have iterated the quickest. Noteflow from students to school counselors, some stakeholders coming into the picture for team MS’s solution to an SSOT announcement app. And lastly team renesan, tackling environment. No competition there. Very compelling solution too!

I think our tech stack hung up our iteration speed. Our prototyping was speedy, but user testing efforts could have saved a bit of us the time to find product fit much more effectively than building a mocked solution. I’m glad to have the opportunity to do user testing though. There is a real issue in this space of career switching in Singapore.

I thought the question we received from Randy was thought inducing- forcing us to put metrics up, to see what success meant. Success is important. I think that may not be the intended messaging, but it does highlight that success has to be considered at the least. Which shines an interesting light on our target user group- because success matters for them too. In some ways, focusing on mental well being, career switchers, is a social problem. Much like build for good is meant to build capability from ground up, it requires top down and ground forces- much like what i think people in our problem space should be positioned to solve it. People. There are two groups outside of us in mental health and community solution spaces use AI and some GPT solution as direct interactions.

Very people driven.

My perspective on leveraging AI has changed a lot tonight.

Signing off