Full Cup was birthed from our own experience and experience of others’ that seemed to come to a peak with the coming of the pandemic. Worker burnout is increasing, with 73% of professionals in 2020 reporting that they are feeling it. Burnout at work can lead to depression, anxiety and resentment and it bleeds into every area of your life. Unfortunately, the way of the world today demands a lot from those who don’t always have a lot to give. We can’t go to every company and lighten the workload, but we can try and help people manage their work-life balance more.

So how can we do that? Initial interviews showed that busy people, who are usually approaching burnout, use their calendars frequently. Meetings go there, dinner plans go there, and other peoples’ meetings and dinner plans go there. It helps them to stay on track and have everything in one place. But while it’s easy for them to plan the things related to work, their free time between work can often turn into more work. We want to help them utilize that free time and turn it into me-time.

Interviews also showed that users had tried apps in this space but they were confusing and overwhelming. Too many clicks and too many “extras” that it made them feel it wasn’t worth it. They required something that didn’t disrupt their routine too much and didn’t require them to be even more glued to their devices.

Full Cup focuses on self-care and everything that isn’t work. Recurring events for health & fitness, nutrition, mindfulness and more can be easily scheduled via the app and dropped right into the users’ primary calendar. It takes away having to schedule every little thing, but it still gets scheduled. Since notifications, and events go into a more-used calendar, users don’t have to be totally reliant on the app. They’re still able to have use for it and log activities completed and how refreshed they feel. Think of it as a personal assistant that solely wants you to focus on you.

‍

Who is Full Cup for?

Full Cup is for Peyton. Peyton is a 33-year-old digital content creator. Peyton lives her life on her phone. It's where she works, it's how she connects with her friends, it's how she lives. She's been working for herself as a freelance content creator for the past 5 years and lives somewhere different every year. It's important to her to plan her schedule meticulously. She works across timezones and is always hustling. Planning work and meetings leave her with little time for herself. Peyton is looking for a product that keeps her accountable and is easy to use while being visually peaceful.

It is important for the designs in Full Cup to maintain a more neutral color theme and layout. Research showed us that many apps in the self-care space leaned more towards targeting women, and it was really apparent. Since self-care is a right for all, it was vital that this product could appeal to everyone. Simple, calming, and inviting.

Learnings

Product Manager Learnings:

Jenita Richards

Co.Lab was my first time in a PM setting at all, so everything was a learning experience for me. I learned how quickly what you have in mind and what the customer needs can not line up, and will have to change. It’s so easy to go too big when it’s important to focus on more specific features and scopes. I learned how important it is for the PM to have a strong point of view for the customer, and be able to share that point of view where it means something to designers and developers. All of these people think in such different ways and it’s important to get them all on the same page through different means.

Designer Learnings:

Priyanka Khanijow

The biggest learning for me has been working in cross-functional teams, but also understanding what to prioritize and what to focus on. As a designer, when you create designs you‘re thinking of the users but I have not always understood how it would affect the development side of it. So understanding the user and prioritizing the feature but making it easy to execute for engineering has been the biggest learning.

Developer Learnings:

Joshua

I gained a better appreciation of the product development process from more of a user’s point of view rather than a developer’s. Since it was my first time implementing designs by someone else, I learned a lot about this whole process and gained an even greater appreciation for it. I learned a lot about Google’s authentication workflows and using the Calendar API.

From my peer group, I really gained a better appreciation of the adaptability and versatility of developers: many of us at Co.Lab have had to quickly learn to use tech we had never used before.

‍

Developers Learnings:

&

Full Team Learning

As a team, we learned how important it is to communicate well with each other. We all got on easily quite quickly and are in similar time zones so that was a huge benefit to us. But even with that there were conversations that we’d leave and follow up in Discord or Trello like “By x did you mean y or z?” and would have to hop on another call or follow up to make things super clear. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the excitement and really want to flex what you’ve learned by forcing things to stick on a wall, but you learn it’s more important to let go and get realistic.