DEV Community: Elvis Rugamba

My firth-week experience in Taskforce 5.0

Elvis Rugamba — Sun, 20 Mar 2022 09:54:27 +0000

The best and most successful products are designed with the people they are creating for in mind. When you understand your customers or end-user, you can create what they want or need. That’s design thinking – a human-centered approach to ideating and solving problems with innovative and creative solutions.

Recently, I have been working on a project but there was something wrong. We have seen that most of the users reach a registration page, but they don’t proceed to other pages. We interrogated the issue and we found that the reason is a long registration form and our customers are busy.

Imagine you bought a fridge and you want it to get delivered to your home, and you found a good app that can help you to book a driver to deliver your load. But when you open the app, you got a long registration form before you proceed. You will get frustrated.

The design thinking process encompasses five stages. Emphasize, define, ideate, prototype, and test.

Empathize – Understand the perspective of the target audience/customer/consumer to identify and address the problem at hand.

Define – Define the problem statement clearly.

Ideate – Brainstorm ways to address identified unmet needs.

Prototype – Identity which of the possible solutions can best solve the identified problem(s).

Test – Test the product with your target audience to get feedback.

In our case, we failed for the first stage. We didn’t emphasize with our customers to truly understand their experience and anticipate their needs. Empathy allows you to set aside your assumptions about the world to gain insight into users and their needs.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from his angle as well as your own

Henry Ford

The design thinking process is iterative, flexible, and focused on collaboration between designers and users, with an emphasis on bringing ideas to life based on how real users think, feel and behave.

The effective way to ensure your next project is a success is to avoid self-referential and start incorporating design thinking exercises with your team.

My fourth-week experience in Taskforce 5.0

Elvis Rugamba — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 09:41:26 +0000

This is the fourth week of taskforce 5.0 and I can’t imagine how time flies. I feel like there is a lot I should have done so far. Maybe it’s a lack of effective time management.

So far, I’ve been delivering my tasks on time. But to achieve that, I had to make a sacrifice. I had to work extra time and use some of my valuable time for rest, fun, or time with my loved ones.

This week we had a session for time management and we did an interesting activity; CONGRATULATIONS! You just won a unique lottery. Your winnings (after taxes) come to a total of $86,400. You have to spend all of the money today. The money can be used for any expense, interest, gifts, or whatever you want, but you have to spend it all TODAY. If you don't spend the money it goes back to the lottery and no one can use it.

My first thought was buying a house. And then I started thinking about all other things I would buy since I had to spend all the money at end of the day; Upgrade my home office, go out for a dinner with family, hang out with friends, invest, donate to charity and give some to family and friends. This made me feel like buying a lottery ticket and dreaming what I would buy with the winnings.

Here is the connection to time management. Each day we have 86,400 seconds to spend. We cannot save it for another day and at the end of the day, it is gone. We have lots of ideas of how we could spend $86,400 in a day but not 86,400 seconds because we value money a lot more than we value time. Like our money, how we spend our time should be based on what matters most to us, like education, income, health, relaxation, and fun.

If I had a habit of managing my time through planning, I wouldn’t have to sacrifice my time. I would have done a lot of things in this past four weeks and still deliver my tasks on time.

Value time as you value money and you will be amazed how much more free time you have and what a great sense of accomplishment you have with better time management.

Remember that time is money.

Benjamin Franklin

My third-week experience in Taskforce 5.0

Elvis Rugamba — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 21:29:48 +0000

Our first session this week was about values; I was excited about the session but unfortunately, I wasn’t able to follow along.

The session was led by one of the Code of Africa (CoA)’s cofounders Axel and it was conducted via miro video meeting. I had an issue joining the meeting because of browser incompatibility. After figuring out the issue. I tried to install the compatible browser but that took time, so I decided to use another computer. Finally, I was able to join the meeting but it was almost at the end. After the session, I had to reach out to my colleagues to help me catch up with what I missed during the session.

In the middle of the session, we were asked to list out our values and we compared them with CoA’s values. My values were passion, integrity, collaboration, responsibility, and patience.

To be passionate means to be enthusiastic or to have an intense desire for something. I believe that one of the keys to success is to do what you are passionate about. As software developers, we encounter challenges in the form of working extra hours trying to fix bugs and also learning new technology. Passion helps us to overcome those challenges.

Passion is energy, feel the power that comes on focusing on what excites you.

Oprah Winfrey

Integrity is the quality of being honest and always doing the right thing, even when no one is looking and even when the choice isn't easy. As we work remotely and no one is always there to check what we’re doing, when we have integrity we gain the trust of our leaders, our colleagues, and our team.

I believe that to achieve difficult tasks in less time, you have to work well with others and you must bring in their knowledge, skills, and experience. Without collaboration quality, you won’t be able to work with others efficiently.

Responsibility is the state of being accountable or to blame for duty or task that you are required or expected to perform. I take ownership of the outcome of my choices - good or bad. When you conduct yourself with personal responsibility and accountability, you build integrity, and with integrity comes trust and respect.

Being patient means listening, observing, taking advice from other people, and seeking relationships that provide new means to make good decisions. You might need to work some extra hours due to an urgent need of some matters. Without patience, you won't be able to accept those challenges and tasks without getting angry.

The values of CoA are creativity, courage, integrity, improvement, sustainability, empathy, growth, transparency, efficiency, and trust. When compared to my values, passion is aligned with courage, integrity as integrity, collaboration as efficiency, responsibility as improvement, and patience is aligned with empathy.

This week I learned that you should always seek clarification and help from others for things you don’t understand well. Without help from my colleagues, I won’t be able to learn what they got from Alex.

My second-week experience in TaskForce 5.0

Elvis Rugamba — Sun, 27 Feb 2022 09:25:27 +0000

Adaptability is a skill that refers to the ability of a person to change his actions, course, or approach to doing things to suit a new situation. Adaptability is not just adjusting to a situation. It encompasses being able to effect changes in a course of action with smoothness and timeliness, without any major setbacks.

Adaptability is being able to adjust to any situation at any given time.

John Wooden

The end of the week was quite intensive and I have had to adapt to a bunch of challenges I faced. From those challenges, I can typically mention stress.

On Friday we gave a presentation about what we’ve learned during the whole week. In the first week, we had our topic a day before our presentation day, and it was quite good because we had enough time to prepare for our presentation. But this week was different, we had our topic before a few hours of our presentation.

Doing research and preparing a presentation in a such small amount of time was very stressful. We divided our topic into parts and each was allocated to a team member. Everyone had to do research on the assigned topic and after that, we had to explain to each other the topics.

This approach helped us as a team, but from my side, I had to add something. In the first few minutes, I was panicking and I was not able to focus on my task. I was only thinking about what will happen if we don’t deliver our presentation instead of thinking about what to do. This kept bothering me, and after wasting my valuable time I realised that I had to change my mind. I took a deep breath and started to think positively.

This helped me to accomplish my task and I was able to share my learnings on the topics with my teammates. We prepared our presentation successfully and we delivered it very well.

So, the only thing that helped me to manage my stress was adaptability. For as long as there are many uncontrollable factors in our environment, it is necessary to acquire adaptability skill.

My first-week experience in TaskForce 5.0

Elvis Rugamba — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 19:03:51 +0000

I have learned and experienced so many new things in such a short period, and time has gone by so quickly.

The depth and detail of what we are learning are far beyond any other experience I’ve ever had. 16 personalities section was interesting because it’s a time dedicated to learning your personality by answering a few questions. I was surprised by how accurate the results were and I was shocked because it was like a person was looking inside my mind and telling me what they saw. I was also introduced to codewars challenges which were challenging but helpful to sharpening my problem-solving skills.

This week was mostly concerned with working with user stories and this was my favorite section because my project management skill has improved significantly. The agile process helped me understand a project not only from a technical perspective but also in business value and its impact on the community. I can understand and write good user stories and allocate them with their acceptance criteria. I learned how the agile process is of benefit to higher product quality, greater client satisfaction, risk reduction, and better project control.

My remote working and presentation skills have improved during this week. I’ve learned the best practices of a virtual meeting and how to prepare and deliver a good presentation. I was also introduced to a new collaborative tool called miro, which is an online whiteboard that helps distributed teams to work effectively.

To round off this week, we had our first presentation and we got to meet with Awesomity lab’s team. We proceed with having fun where we played football and ping pong. it was an amazing experience and made me realize how good it is CoA and Awesomity lab’s culture.

Time has been flying by and it’s hard to believe that we have been on boot camp for a week already. Life at boot camp is a great experience that I plan to make the most out of.

My experience so far is not limited to the above mentioned, they are many. I can only describe my experience so far as impressive.