SmartCoach
Discover Smart Coach: the ultimate platform for amateur football coaches. Streamline scheduling, communication, and team management in one user-friendly hub. Save time, reduce frustration, and focus on your team's success with powerful features, customizable settings, and data-driven insights. Elevate your coaching experience today!
Product Experience
Problem Space
Problem Statement
How might we streamline the process of scheduling and management of practices and matches for amateur football coaches of all ages, focusing on teams across all levels of amateur football in Switzerland, making it more convenient, less time-consuming, and more efficient for the coaches?
Problem Background
The problem to address is the cumbersome and time-consuming process amateur football coaches in Switzerland face when scheduling and managing practices and matches for their teams. Coaches daily struggle with coordinating schedules, collecting players' availability, communicating changes, and managing potential conflicts. As a result, they end up spending an estimated 4 hours per week on administrative tasks instead of focusing on coaching and player development.
Research Insights
User Pain Points
After defining the target persona(s) in-depth interviews and surveys have been conducted.
Our primary buying persona is Coah Chris.
Our secondary buying persona is Player Daniel.
Supporting Data
Our conducted research and in-depth interviews showed that that amateur football coaches face numerous challenges when scheduling and managing practices and matches for their teams such as coordinating schedules, collecting players' availability, communicating changes, and managing potential conflicts.
A significant portion of coaches (55.5%) are either unhappy or very unhappy with the current process of scheduling and managing practices and matches.The majority of coaches (77.7%) spend 3-6 hours weekly on scheduling practices and matches.
Additionally, 100% rated effective communication with players in the scheduling and management process to be important or very important.
There are over 14,000 amateur football coaches in Switzerland that are potential users of our solution. Thats a perfect size to prove our hypothesis and test our MVP. In a next step, Germany and Austra with another 150’000 football coaches will be targeted.
Feedback
Our data from the survey and in-deph interviews highlighted that there is a clear need for a more efficient and user-friendly tool that can streamline the scheduling and management process for amateur football coaches. This tool should integrate with existing digital calendars and messaging apps, and provide effective communication features to ensure smooth coordination with players.
Landing on the Solution
Based on our target users paintpoints the goal of SmartCoach is to simplify the process for amateur football coaches, reduce frustration, and improve overall efficiency by creating an easy-to-use platform that centralizes scheduling, communication, and management tasks.
The hypothesis is that by providing an intuitive and centralized platform tailored to the specific needs of amateur football coaches of all ages, we can reduce the time and effort they spend on scheduling, communication, and team management by 30% to two hours. By optimizing these aspects, we can increase overall efficiency and allow coaches to focus more on improving their team's performance and fostering player development.
Explanation of Solution
Our first MVP release that will be tested and validated as cheaply as possible include:
- Centralized Event Calendar: Create a simple, user-friendly event system that allows coaches to add, edit, delete and view practice and match schedules and share with players.
- Player Availability Collection: Develop a straightforward method for players to submit their availability for each event. This could be done through a simple form that players fill out, which then gets automatically processed and stored in the system.
- Player Management: Provide coaches with an easy-to-use interface to view and manage their players, including the ability to track attendance, assign positions, and view player availability.
User Flows
Link to Figma
Low-fidelity Wireframes
Link to Figma
High-fidelity Wireframes
Link to Figma
Implementation Details
Technical Implementation
Where is it hosted?
What is your tech stack?
React&Nodge
High lever journey of a request
https://smart-coach-api.vercel.app/api-docs
Technical challenges
What was the hardest part of development?
The hardest part of development in this project was working with TypeScript for both the Node.js Express backend and the React frontend. TypeScript introduced a strict typing system, requiring careful attention to detail and adherence to type definitions. It initially posed a steep learning curve, as it required understanding and implementing complex type annotations. However, despite the difficulties, working with TypeScript provided long-term benefits, such as improved code quality, enhanced maintainability, and better scalability. Overcoming these challenges allowed for a more robust and reliable codebase, ultimately contributing to the project's success.
Does your app have any scaling issues?
We have implemented PlanetScale, which includes load balancers and built-in scaling capabilities. This ensures that our app can handle increased demand and automatically manage scaling as needed. With PlanetScale's features in place, we are confident in our app's ability to handle scaling requirements effectively.
What are some key takeaways?
- Effective communication
- Agile project management
- Collaborative teamwork
- Documentation and knowledge sharing
- Continuous learning and improvement
Future Steps
We will be finalising our production MVP and will test it in the market. If we collect enough evidence that supports that there is demand for our product in the market we consider to continue working on it.
Learnings
Product Manager Learnings:
Adrian Dubler
A crucial lesson I've learned is that success in any product depends heavily on knowing your problem space and understanding your target persona in and out. It's important to fall in love with the problem, not the solution, as this allows you to focus on the needs of your audience and develop a solution that truly meets their needs. Focus is absolutely key and without an effective communication, and the right motivation and approach within the team everything gets much harder and becomes inefficient.
Designer Learnings:
Atakan Bacaksız
The biggest lesson I’ve learned I need to improve my communication skills, focus to first steps and I shouldn’t skip any steps through to final work. I should read twice any personas or any context before start my work, I also should ask more questions and focus the first steps and get it done carefully.
Developer Learnings:
Rao Muhammad Akif Tufail
During the development phase of the project, I faced an unexpected challenge when I fell ill and had to take a break from work due to fever. This unforeseen circumstance disrupted the coordination and progress of the entire team, causing me to worry about meeting the project deadlines. However, after recovering from the illness within 10 days, I was determined to make up for the lost time and contribute actively to the development process. With renewed focus and dedication, I managed to complete all the remaining tasks in just one week. This experience taught me the importance of resilience and adaptability in a team setting. As a developer, I learned that setbacks can occur unexpectedly, and it is crucial to have contingency plans and backup resources in place to ensure project continuity. Despite the challenges I faced, I gained valuable insights into time management, perseverance, and the ability to deliver results under pressure. This experience reinforced the importance of resilience and adaptability in overcoming obstacles and meeting project goals successfully.
Developers Learnings:
Tejas Shah
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My learnings from the program are Communication and Time Management are key to success. I also learnt pre-planning and following the plan is beneficial. On my development side, I learnt Prisma that can be used for backend development and from my team mate I learnt a hack of reusing templates and saving time during project setup.
Full Team Learning
We faced some very hard internal challenges that made it really difficult to work as a team and to get something done. However we never gave up and tried to make the best of it. We have learned that there is always a way no matter how hopeless it might seem.